


rebirth project

by amille



Category: K (Anime), Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Other, Red King Tsuna, self-indulgent writing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-08-21 22:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 33,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8263408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amille/pseuds/amille
Summary: He dreams of an orange flame that sits atop his head, orange flames that he holds in the circle of his fists. He dreams that he is the fire, standing amongst a graveyard of broken toys and a ruined room, in a wreck of a world that the fire eats away. The sky is clear when Tsuna looks up, because he is the fire before which all filth will burn, the embodiment of the Will that will dismantle a legacy of sin. And Tsuna can almost hear the words, the way that the sky tries to tell him--You will be king.KHR/K Fusion.





	1. Nagi

**Author's Note:**

> honestly, all i'd wanted to write when i started was "Tsuna is the Red King" which then somehow mutated and turned into... this. so instead of the simple transplant of K's system into KHR, it became more of a mesh of ideas. featuring drama(tic writing!), pain, and fluff. hopefully fluff, at least eventually. heavy AU/fusion. entirely self-indulgent.
> 
> WARNING for PTSD-esque symptoms, especially in the beginning, i guess? that hadn't been my intention to write, but it can come across as such, i think, so i apologize for any inconsistencies in its depiction as a result.

Tsuna doesn't know that people are supposed to have five, _only_ five, sense until a teacher is gently, but firmly, admonishing his insistence that there must be more. Tsuna doesn't believe this until the children aren't gentle at all with their laughter and mockery of how his eyes pool with tears. It's easy to fall into self-doubt when the teacher tells him that _we must not tell lies, Tsuna-kun,_ tells him to _shush now, Tsuna-kun._

_Leave the superpowers to the superheroes, Tsuna-kun._ Leave it for your dreams.

It's as though they don't see the world in two, can't see how things will unfold before them, doesn't _know_ how certain things are meant to be.

But then, no one else seems to be as good at dodgeball as Tsuna, who finds it easier to watch the people than to watch the ball to evade an ousting. No one else seems to fear bullies in the same, distant way that Tsuna does, because no one can catch him when Tsuna doesn't want to be caught. No one else seems to be able to read the truth from a person's expression, to squeeze out secrets from reading the atmosphere of a room. No one can seem to lie to him, and that's how he knows that there is no ill intent behind their disbelief.

_Creepy Tsuna_ , they call him. _Tsuna the Weirdo._ Always seeing things that aren't there, always so much better than everyone else in the oddest of ways. So weird, so creepy.

And Tsuna, all he wants are people who will smile when he comes into the classroom. People who seeks him out during lunch times. People who he can invite to his birthday, people who will invite him to sleepovers.

So he tries. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes more than once of accidentally sidestepping something that is not yet there before he starts to learn. It takes even longer still to ignore the whispers of his other sense, his sixth sense. It's not until much later that he stops jumping at the shadows that move, to stop seeing danger where danger could not possibly exist.

After all, danger cannot come from an expensive black car. Men in fancy suits wouldn't stalk a boy in elementary school. An adult's hand wouldn't reach out from unseen corners to bruise him around the arms, wouldn't wrap him up and take him far, far away from home.

*

When Tsuna opens his eyes, the world is white, so white, so terribly white. There's a buzz where silence should be, pain where there should be peace.

He'd been taken, Tsuna remembers dimly. He'd been taken, and he'd had to bring himself back.

_You went through something terrible, Tsuna. Will you talk to me about it?_

Tsuna shakes his head because there's nothing to talk about. He doesn't have the words. He doesn't know how to tell them that sometimes, he remembers how he can't breathe. How sometimes, there's water in his nose, in his lungs. How sometimes, there's something sharp pressing patterns into the skin of his torso, his legs. How he loses his voice mid-scream and barely has the energy to try.

Tsuna doesn't have the words for any of that. Doesn't have the courage to tell anyone about how the darkness whispers to him, whispers to him _still_ , urging him to _become a king. You will be king._

"I don't know how," Tsuna whispers back.

"In any way you know how is fine, Tsuna," the doctor before him says.

Tsuna blinks.

The warmth of the room is shocking. A prayer made true, a trick of his imagination. But his hands are shaking on his lap, and the tremors feel too real to be a dream. That, and Tsuna has only ever dreamed of one thing, so this room of quiet and stillness is probably… not a dream.

Still, though. _Still._ Tsuna can't help but curl his fingers in tight, just in case. His nails catch their teeth into his palm in confirmation, and Tsuna--

Tsuna can breathe again. He can breathe out.

The doctor before him reminds him of a fish that he used to have, brown and fuzzy and harmless. Her pants are loose and flowing, beige and mild. Her sweater is knitted with the pattern of waves, muddy with its browns. Her sneakers look like the ones that he used to have, ones that used to light up when he hopped on concrete.

Concrete that smells of his own vomit, sickly and pungent. Concrete that looks as red as the blood that flows from his fingertips, that makes him think, _oh._

_Oh. I'm still here._

"Tsuna," the doctor says when Tsuna says nothing at all, "What do you see?"

The question begs Tsuna to pause. It's a question to which he'd also like to know the answer, because when Tsuna closes his eyes and tries to think about nothing at all, he's looking back at something that looks like an eye, bright and otherworldly.

His sixth sense tells him that this eye is waiting, having grown patient in its old age. It will wait until Tsuna is ready, because Tsuna is _a fine specimen, a true candidate._

_You will be king._

Tsuna blinks again at the doctor, owlish and disoriented. "I don't know. But I… I asked it, for help."

The doctor's face fractures into a thousand little pieces. Shatters under the weight of her pity, just like everyone else around Tsuna these days. Her voice is deceptively steady despite the tremble of emotion that underlies the words that she speaks next. Tsuna mutes it out. He's heard it all before.

Tsuna wonders if she'd still look so sad if she knew about the fire. About how the eye had responded when he'd asked ( _help us, help me make it all stop_ ), gleaming with a shade of red that Tsuna has seen nowhere else. How it'd responded to him, and how Tsuna had breathed in something other than water, something more potent than agony. How he'd swallowed mouthfuls of ash instead of his own misery, how he'd bathed in the bones that had exploded into dust and smoke.

She'd be horrified, his intuition whispers to him. It's one of many secrets that Tsuna learns to keep.

*

The space beneath his blankets is a warm and contained place, and it's Tsuna's favorite place in the world. The walls are lumpy and sometimes Tsuna has to emerge just to breathe, but it's a space of his own, a space in which the rules are his to control.

He feels safe within these walls, not only from those who'd hurt him but also from the lingering eyes of those that try to help him. It's safe, here, to let go.

The fire comes quietly to his open palm, a dance of orange and yellow and red. It jumps between his fingertips as it grows, growing large enough to set the whole of him aflame. He burns like he burns in his dreams, a little firefly under the duvet. It's not nearly enough to release the pressure in his chest, but it's enough to momentarily silence the darkness that tells him to become a king, to destroy and rend the world asunder.

It's on one of those nights that it happens, an accident. An inevitable confrontation. Fate. Tsuna will later learn all of these words, and how they can mean the same thing.

His eyes are closed when the covers are drawn back, when he's trying to burn away the need to burn. His eyes are closed and then they're not, snapping open to the sound of a startled intake of breath.

"Tsuna," his dad says. The heartbreak is audible in his dad's voice, as is the grim determination that nips at its heels.

His dad doesn't let Tsuna flinch away. His dad, the man that used to be no more than a bedtime story, tugs him close to hold him tight, to burn alongside Tsuna. He presses promises into Tsuna's hair, things like, "I'll keep you safe, Tsuna-fish. Papa will fix this."

Tsuna falls asleep to those words, sniffling against the shoulder that his head lolls against, caught under the spell that they weave. It feels like an anesthetic to the ice that slides down his spine, piercing the ends of his nerves. Soon, there's nothing where something ( _something important_ ) should be, boxed up and tucked away. Sealed, for as long as Tsuna needs it to be. The fire dims in mourning.

This is just a dream, he is told. No more than a nightmare. Forget about it, Tsuna-fish. Forget all about it. Papa will keep you safe.

*

What Tsuna ends up remembering is this:

"Take care of mama for me," his dad is saying. His dad's smile is weak, faint and more than a little bit scared. His dad has to leave them again, Tsuna and Tsuna's mom, because people has to take turns in keeping the stars company, and his had come.

For crimes against the natural order, murmur the boogeymen in bandages. (For him, his intuition tells him instead. For Tsuna, for what had to be done.) They look to Tsuna as they speak, and Tsuna holds on tightly to the grandfather that he doesn't have, taking comfort in the pulse of a lingering flame that burns within the man.

His dad also looks to him. Looks straight at him. "I love you, Tsuna-fish."

Tsuna isn't sad. He hardly knows this man.

But, still.

"Bye, Papa," Tsuna hopes to have said.

*

The world feels stilted and unfamiliar when Tsuna opens his eyes next. There are gentle voices and touches that are gentler still, slow and choreographed. Tsuna flinches, each and every time.

"Good morning, Tsu-kun," his mom says. She's been crying again; there are tracks on her face that glimmer under the sterile light of his room ( _in the hospital, he's in the hospital_ ), betraying the tears that she must have wiped away. Except his mother is smiling; she's smiling, she can't have been crying. Just a trick of the mind.

_You mustn't lie to us, Sawada Tsunayoshi. We know what you can see._

Tsuna shivers, numb and nauseous. He makes himself go still. It will lessen the pain in the end.

"Tsu-kun," his mom says, and this time, her tears aren't imaginary at all. "I'm going to-- to touch you. Okay?"

Tsuna expects her fingers to hurt. He expects them to curl tight around his throat.

They rest in his hair like kisses, gentle as raindrops.

*

Things get better from there.

Tsuna finds the confidence to walk further and further away from the safety of his mom in small increments. He's able to meet people's eyes. He allows himself to be touched without giving into the instinct to flinch.

He still has to see the doctors, though. Something about ensuring proper development. Something about posttraumatic stress management. His mom is never shy to bring him to a multitude of clinics, whichever may be the case.

_Tsunayoshi-kun_ , someone calls. It's a voice that Tsuna recognizes, a voice that's been scraped raw by the aftermath of screams. Tsuna turns his head to the right to press his other cheek into the concrete, his eyes growing wet as he struggles to smile. He smiles for the person who reaches back for him, for the person whose fingers press into the rotten mess that is Tsuna's hair, trying to help soothe the fire that licks its way through his veins.

Tsuna turns his head to the right, and he's back at the clinic. He's at the clinic and there is someone looking back, a girl with eyes so haunted that it takes him a few minutes to remind himself that he's not _there_ anymore. That _there_ is just a dream, a nightmare. Something that he just needs to forget.

"Tsu-kun?" his mom startles when Tsuna tugs himself out of her grip.

"I want to say hello," Tsuna tells her.

"Oh, but," his mom begins to say, but Tsuna is already beyond her, swift in his travels to a girl whose eyes go wide with surprise at his approach.

"My name," Tsuna says, "Is Tsuna. Sawada Tsunayoshi."

She's slow to take his hand, as though she's scared to dispel a mirage that embodies her fears, her hopes. That's okay, Tsuna feels the same every time he turns to look at his mom. Tsuna knows to wait, that this takes time.

She takes his hand with one hand, and then two. Smiles shyly and awkwardly, "I, um. I'm… Nagi."

*

His doctor is an older man that sits straight and proper, a man with regal curve to his nose. His hair and mustache is white, like the snow of Christmas morning, and he's genuine in a way that few people are, with calm eyes that reflect the bark of an evergreen. Tsuna finds it easy to relax under the tenor of his voice, awkwardly delighted by the man's terrible choice in sweaters.

"I saw that you made a friend the other day," the doctor says.

Tsuna stops mid-chew, leaving the taffee candy to melt in his mouth unassisted. He says, a little warily, "Nagi?"

"Ah, yes. Nagi," the doctor says, "Poor girl. She seems like a nice girl, but she doesn't seem to have a lot of friends." A short pause, a considering one. "She doesn't even have her mom like you do, Tsuna. Her mom considers her a burden, at most. The poor girl has been alone all her life."

The words are straightforward, easy to understand. They're also a little hard to hear because they make his chest ache in weird ways, but they feel all the more truthful for it. This is what Tsuna likes most about this man, the way that he soften his words like the rest of them. He expects Tsuna to be young, but he doesn't demand Tsuna to be a child. It makes his presence all that more tolerable, easier to endure. He makes it seem as though he might actually listen if Tsuna had anything to say about his nightmares. That he wouldn't ask _how do you feel about that_ , or for Tsuna to _move on, forget._

It's nice.

Though, as a doctor, he probably shouldn't be telling Tsuna _any_ of this about Nagi. Tsuna doesn't dare tell him that though. It's not like Tsuna wants him to _stop_ , after all.

"Please be good to her," the doctor says with a small smile, "You're probably her first friend."

"Oh," Tsuna startles.

"You're not alone, Tsuna," the man says later, near the end of their session. He rests his hand on Tsuna's head as he kneels down to meet Tsuna's eyes. His hand is warm with the weight of his years, warm despite their calluses. "Be happy. I will do all that I can so that you can live as your papa has always wished for you."

Tsuna stares at him, stares at him for a long, long time. When the man doesn't turn away and continues to meet his gaze, unchanging in his convictions, Tsuna feels safe enough to nod. He nods, and decides to try.

*

Nagi can never stay very long because Nagi's mother is a cold and distant figure that sends Nagi to the doctors with a different chaperone every week. But the ladies behind the counter are very kind and very smart, so Tsuna begins to see Nagi when his appointment finishes with at least two or three in queue before it's Nagi's turn. It gives them fifteen minutes together. Sometimes thirty.

In contrast, _Tsuna's_ mom has a heart that is big enough to kill her, so she knows to pick up a magazine to read when Tsuna goes to sit with Nagi. She waits until Nagi's gone before trying to take him home.

They don't say much, Tsuna and Nagi. Tsuna doesn't think they have to. Nagi seems happy to sit next to him in silence, content to bask in their shared warmth.

That isn't to say they don't talk _ever_ , just that sometimes, Tsuna wants to do nothing but to listen to the music of the doctors' clinic with someone ( _someone dear_ ) by his side. Nagi lets him have that. Seems to understand the importance of it. She blooms under it like an odd little duckling, blooms despite the weight of things unshared that sit between them.

"Nagi," a nurse calls out. She sounds apologetic.

Nagi slips off her stool after a moment's delay, smoothing out the wrinkles of her white summer dress. She looks back at Tsuna like she always does, smiles as only Nagi is able to, and says, "Um, I'll see you next week, Tsuna-san."

The fire within Tsuna settles at her words. His smile is always a rusted thing, toothy and uneven, but he tries, for her. "Thanks, Nagi."

*

They begin to play eight weeks after their first meeting, solving puzzles, filling out colouring books, building their dreams out of blocks.

Blocks are what they most often choose to play, squatting down to their knees on the floor with the pieces spread out around them. Nagi only ever builds a castle that she surrounds with a moat and loneliness, just like how Tsuna only ever stacks the blocks around himself like a fence, a cage from which he tries and tries again to find escape by knocking them down. Knocking them down. Knocking them down.

Nagi watches him destroy his creations until one day she doesn't. That day, she leaves her castle to settle herself right next to where Tsuna traps himself. She has to do this two more times over the next two weeks before Tsuna understands. One more time after that before Tsuna lets her inside.

When the blocks finish rising like rusted bars around them, Tsuna feels ready.

"I have this-- nightmare," Tsuna starts. "About a small room."

Nagi listens without interruption despite the questions that must tickle at her lips. She tucks her head right against his so that she can hear the soft rhythm of his whispers, his fragmented tales. He doesn't tell her about the fire, or his dad, but he tells her more than he's told anyone else, and she listens. She listens, and demands nothing back.

Doctors wouldn't allow him to speak like this, not without wanting to dissect how he's feeling. They wouldn't let him get away with saying, _I don't know_ when he says that he's unsure of how to feel about being kept in a cage as something to be drowned, choked, hurt, and starved. They'd want him to talk so that they can prove him wrong, to tell him that he's safe. They'd want him to talk so that they can tell him that there's nothing wrong, that there's nothing wrong with _him_. They'd want him to forget.

"I think--" Tsuna falters at the end. He stares down at his hands and imagines them brighter than they appear now. He imagines holding supernovas between his fingers, contained and lethal. He imagines burning those that try to love him. "I think that I-- hurt a lot of people. I'm looking for a way out without doing that."

"Even if they hurt you?" Nagi asks. She's fidgeting with the block in her hands, twisting it, making sense of it.

"They won't hurt me if I don't hurt them," Tsuna tells her. Except-- that's wrong, isn't it? Somehow, that's wrong. He knows that it's wrong. But that's still what makes most sense to him so that's what he has to say.

Tsuna rubs his palms against the clean, glossy surface of the clinic's floor and feels the cut of old rubble against his skin. The grit under his nails, the sweat and the blood that are (not) on his knuckles. Tsuna scrubs those knuckles over his eyes and says, "I don't want to be the only one. That gets to be okay."

"Mm," Nagi says. She's slow to nod, but it's thoughtful. Genuine. "That does sound lonely."

"What about yours?" Tsuna asks, thinking back to the castles that Nagi had used to build.

She smiles at him, small and subdued. "I figured it out."

"Oh," Tsuna says, disappointed and jealous.

"I don't need a castle when you're here, Tsuna-san," Nagi says, patting her dress clean as she gets to her feet, to balance her block on the highest point that she can reach.

"Oh," Tsuna says again.

*

"I used to come here because my father left," Nagi tells him on a day that they're both too tired to play.

Tsuna lifts his head and blinks away the crusted exhaustion from his eyes while his heart thuds sharply against his chest.

Nagi smiles, but there is no humour to it, no warmth. Just thorns, poisonous and self-deprecating. Tsuna doesn't like that smile at all. She says, "Our house is really big without him, and my mother is… busy, so I had to stay there by myself a lot. So I thought that if I-- if I saw a doctor, I'd at least get to go outside. Mother has to go on TV sometimes, so she, um, liked the idea that I came here for…"

Tsuna is only nine, pushing ten, but he thinks that he can hear why Nagi trails off, what she isn't saying. _Won't_ say, because if she says them out loud, those words will gain traction. She can't say what it means to have a mother who never comes to the clinic like Tsuna's does, what it might mean to see a doctor for the sake of your mom, who appears on TV. Because if she speaks, those words will become the truth, and Tsuna is still too small to save Nagi from the real world.

But Tsuna _can_ uncurl from Nagi's side to give her his hand, so he does just that.

Nagi takes it. "But now I'm… glad." _That he left, that I'm here._ She exhales, slow and even. "Does that make me a bad person?"

If she's a bad person, then Tsuna is worse, because he can't think to do anything but say, "I don't care. I like having Nagi here."

Nagi pauses to look at him, to ask, ever serious, "Tsuna-san, are you good at sharing?"

Ever since the nightmares, Tsuna's gotten rather rotten at sharing, so the answer's a _no_ , but.

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?" Tsuna whines.

Nagi giggles and swings her legs back and forth, back and forth like the rhythm of a swing, the freedom of a bird in flight.

*

They still play with blocks more often than not, but it's not all they do.

Sometimes, they read stories, where they press their chairs close together so that they can be shoulder-to-shoulder while a small book about knights and princesses lie open across their laps. There aren't a lot of words to this story, just pictures and their colours. Tsuna likes it a lot. He likes Nagi's warmth even better, and his eyes grow heavy with contentment.

After all, his mom is nearby, as is Nagi. The doctors of this clinic are both scary and smart, and he knows all the nurses by name. He's safe. He's as safe as he can ever be. He might even be loved.

Tsuna is careful and slow when he rests his head on Nagi's shoulder. There's an explosion of whispers from the ladies behind the counter when he does, a birdsong of excitement that makes Tsuna's face feel warm and the tips of his ears hot to touch. But he's tired and determined, and while Nagi squeaks in her surprise, she's not pushing him away, so he figures that this is okay, probably.

It _is_ okay, it's even nice, until he starts to dream. And Tsuna has only ever dreamed of one thing since-- just, since.

He dreams of an orange flame that sits atop his head, orange flames that he holds in the circle of his fists. He dreams that he _is_ the fire, standing amongst a graveyard of broken toys and a ruined room, in a wreck of a world that the fire eats away. The sky is clear when Tsuna looks up, because he is the fire before which all filth will burn, the embodiment of the Will that will dismantle a legacy of sin. And Tsuna can almost hear the words, the way that the sky tries to tell him--

_You will be king_.

Tsuna wakes up.

Tsuna wakes up, and he yanks himself away from Nagi and into the safer circle of his mom's embrace, shuddering against her as she tries to keep him from flying apart. There's a murmur of concern that rips through the clinic that becomes the accompanying bass to the beat of the nurses' shoes. They usher Tsuna and his mom into the privacy of a room, and Tsuna grips his mom tight through it all as he shakes and shakes and shakes.

"Mom," Tsuna says.

"I'm here, Tsu-kun. I'm here," his mom says. She doesn't ever cry anymore, but her voice is faint with exhaustion, with the strain of loving a boy as broken as Tsuna.

He never knows how long it takes for the world to realign itself, for the bad dreams to fall away. This time, it only seems to take minutes. It's a small mercy.

Nagi doesn't seem to be there when they come back outside, and with Tsuna determined to look at nothing but the floor, he has no way to check. He comes out of the room with his hand in his mom's, wary of the pity that permeates the room. His fingers are clammy and chapped, surely uncomfortable to hold onto, but his mom's grip never loosens. Her love doesn't wane, at least not today.

"I want to go home," Tsuna says when the doctors, the nurses, _his mom_ asks if he wants to talk. He just wants to go home.

*

It's something of a surprise when they find Nagi _outside-_ outside, outside of the clinic, waiting for them at the sidewalk that borders the clinic's parking lot. Her white dress whips around her like a breath of mist, as the winds that hints at the coming of a summer storm whistles past. Her hair is an even greater mess, ruffled as it is, and Tsuna doesn't think she's ever looked as bright as she does now, alight and alive with the strength of her will.

"Tsuna-san," Nagi says when Tsuna comes within hearing distance. She waits until Tsuna is looking at her, waits until Tsuna nods once before she curls her arms around Tsuna's neck, smothering him with devotion that feels too old and too great for a small girl like her.

This is when Tsuna's mom lets him go, and she's so, so careful with him, careful enough to leave behind a lingering ache. But it's also in reassurance, Tsuna knows, in reassurance that it isn't rejection that she offers with how she pulls away, but encouragement. Tsuna understands.

He's also thankful, because when Tsuna's mom lets him go, he has the hands that he needs to hang onto Nagi instead. He holds on tight, just in case that this time might be the last time that he's allowed.

"Tsuna-san," Nagi says again. There's a slight hiccup to her syllables this time around, a tremble of a question.

"I had a bad dream," Tsuna tells Nagi in explanation, an excuse. He tries not to shake as he admits, "The one where I-- hurt everyone. Sometimes it takes me a while to wake up, and I didn't want to scare… scare you." _I didn't want to scare you away._

"It was scary," Nagi admits, "Because it looked like you were hurting. But I wouldn't have left." Nagi closes her eyes in a flutter of eyelashes against Tsuna's neck. "I wouldn't have left you."

She says, "I have bad dreams too. About not being wanted. Sometimes, when I'm at home alone, I feel like I'm always dreaming."

A living nightmare with a cold beating heart. Tsuna holds on even tighter, and Nagi simply squeezes him back, soothing and solid.

"But, ever since we met, I got to know what's real and what's not," Nagi tells him. "You do that for me, Tsuna-san. So I want to do that for you too." Nagi's face is determined and fierce when Tsuna draws back to look at her, startled. Her eyes are still purple, but they're no longer haunted and lost. The fire that burns within her is a gentle, flickering indigo, deceptive in its frailty. "I want to help you get away from that… that small room. Like a knight might."

Tsuna blinks. "A knight?"

"Like, um, like the story we read," Nagi says with a smile that reassures him that she's still the small, shy Nagi underneath all that strength, "Because a knight protects people, and I… I want…"

Tsuna wonders at the taste of deja vu on his tongue. He tries to reconcile the way that Nagi's face had never been wet with sweat and blood, how her compassion had never been stretched thin by the force of her hatred. She's a small girl, but she's never been skeletal, never truly broken under the weight of heartache and guilt. She is his friend, but she owes him nothing; her company is a gift, week after week. She is not the one who'd left a kiss to his broken knuckles and had called him, _my liege_.

She is not the first to pledge to him.

Nagi leans away even further as to rest her fingers on Tsuna's face. "So… so, please." _Please believe me._ "Don't leave. Please let me stay with you. May I?"

She isn't the first, but she is the first that he can remember, and it feels _so good_ to have someone share the fire that keeps trying to eat him whole. It gives him hope that this nightmare could end.

"... Okay," Tsuna mumbles at last. It's his turn to hiccup as he smiles. "Okay. Just, no take-backs."

Nagi's face opens like the dawn, flowering under the light of a clear new sky.

*

"So... what does a knight do?" Tsuna asks, weeks later.

Nagi's expression crinkles in thought, as though she hadn't thought beyond her vow to protect Tsuna. That's another thing that Tsuna has yet to figure out-- protect him from what, exactly? It isn't as though she can stop the dreams or make them better. Not even his mom can do that, and Tsuna is starting to believe that his mom can do anything. Plus, knights protect princesses, and Tsuna isn't a princess. He doesn't fancy himself as royalty.

"Um," Nagi says.

"Do you need a sword?" Tsuna tries. A sword and armor seems to be as good as place as any to start Nagi's transformation, but theirs is a world contained within the walls of this clinic, and Tsuna doesn't think they have nearly enough blocks to build a sword, much less armor.

"Um," Nagi says again, this time in a cringe. "I don't think… a sword…"

"Do you want something else?" Tsuna asks. Maybe a horse?

Nagi bites her lower lip. "What about Tsuna-san?"

"Me?" Tsuna blinks.

"What would you use to protect someone?" Nagi asks.

Tsuna feels his eyes migrate down to where his hands are resting in his lap, where they can curl into fists. His fingers are warm when he raises them to the middle of his chest, hot when they migrate a little to the left to where his heart flutters against his ribs. Every beat rattles the sealed box of secrets that sit distantly in the back of his mind, already half-opened by the grace of his regard.

He shakes his head. Some things, he knows, aren't meant to be opened. (Not yet, not until he's ready, whenever that may be.)

"I don't want to talk about me," he says, "There's no way that I can protect someone anyway."

Nagi is quiet until she isn't, becoming a rustle of movement as she comes out of her chair to stand in front of Tsuna. "You're wrong, Tsuna-san."

"I'm not wrong," Tsuna argues.

"You're wrong," Nagi says, this time more firmly.

"There's no way. There's no way that I could," Tsuna says. He _couldn't_. Not with a fire so loud, so hot, that it could burn away a century of sins. Certainly, he could destroy all that needed destroying to keep his mom and Nagi safe, but then, they might not have a world to live in, afterwards. They might not have anyone but Tsuna to share their lives, and that-- that wouldn't be happiness. "I've only ever-- hurt people. I'm-- I'm no good."

" _You're wrong_ ," Nagi snaps, and her voice is frigid in her anger, and Tsuna stares up at her, slack-jawed. "I won't let anyone speak badly about Tsuna-san. Even if it's Tsuna-san himself."

" _Nagi_ ," Tsuna whines, embarrassed. He glances briefly to the left, hoping for a place to escape. Like a wall, maybe a hole. What he sees instead is his mom, sitting in the background with laughter on her lips, and that's somehow even _worse_. Tsuna looks away hurriedly. "B-Besides! Nagi's the one that wants to be a knight. It only matters what you want."

Nagi glares at him a little longer before she acquiesces with a sigh. "May I have some time think about it?"

"Y-Yeah, of course," Tsuna says, happy to put the conversation behind them.

"I'm sorry," Nagi says, ten minutes later when it's her time to see the doctor, "For, um. For my rudeness."

"It's okay," Tsuna says after a moment to blink. It's okay because one, it _is_ okay, and two-- "You weren't being rude, you were… you were just being nice. Right?"

"Yes, but--" Nagi says. She smiles shyly. "Tsuna-san is very kind. Even if he's being silly."

Tsuna pouts and wrinkles his nose in protest, and Nagi covers her giggle with a hand.

But he doesn't mind it, not really, because making her smile wasn't so terrible of a thing. Even if it _was_ at his expense.

*

Then, like the fairytale that he knew her to be, it ends. It ends in a park.

It starts with Tsuna taking Nagi's hand and asking the nurses, the doctors, if Nagi could spend her hour with him instead. He asks, _please_ , can they could go outside and play? There's a park that's only a block away, and Nagi's a _knight_ now. She could keep them both safe. There are some _hm_ 's and _but_ 's for the first little while, but Tsuna holds strong and waits like his intuition instructs. He holds Nagi's hand and stays quiet through it all, though he can't say that he'd played fair with his eyes, wide and hopeful.

"How about," one of the doctors finally thinks to say, "We combine Tsuna and Nagi's sessions together next week? It'd be good to observe how they take to being in public."

It's a weak reason, clinically. Ridiculous, even. But an excuse is all that these adults need, and sure enough next week, Tsuna and Nagi find themselves in the park. They take the first ten minutes just to explore, to become acclimated to being outside and free. This is their mistake, wandering too far. It makes Tsuna tense for all of two seconds, makes his steps linger and pause.

Two seconds, then Nagi finds a stick. And the world seems to close back around them, a world with a population of two.

Nagi swings the stick dual-handed, and gives Tsuna a smile. "What do you think about something like this, Tsuna-san?"

"Oh," Tsuna says, coming closer. "Your sword?"

"No, I was thinking… um, something longer, maybe," Nagi says. She edges her hands to the very end of the stick and lifts it high and tall, taller than herself. "Like this?"

"Mm…" Tsuna peers at it, then shrugs. He doesn't really get it, but whatever. "I think it's okay. Do you like it?"

"I…" Nagi says. She also says, "… Tsuna-san."

It's the sudden change in Nagi's demeanor that has Tsuna going tense, flinching at how the alarm that flickers across her face is quick to give way into fear. Tsuna turns on his heel so that she's behind him, so that he can stand in-between her and the man that had caught her attention and now, his. A man in a suit. A dark fancy suit. A man that probably has an expensive car and a box full of nightmares waiting inside.

Tsuna doesn't realize the speed of his breathing until Nagi curls a tight hand around his wrist. Squeezing. Grounding him.

"Why, if it isn't Nagi-chan!" the man in the suit simpers. "We've been looking for you. Come with me, sweetheart, mommy's waiting."

Tsuna isn't surprised to hear the _we_ ; men like these, they were like dogs, estranged dogs, that play at being wolves. They play at being smart and fierce, but only with prey that are young, crippled, or weak. Tsuna backs into Nagi as the man approaches, swallowing with some difficulty when the man pauses to consider him in detail.

"Big bro," another man, a man with a scar down his face, says from a few steps behind the man in a suit, "Hurry up,  Saburo can't keep 'em distracted forever."

"It looks like Nagi-chan brought a friend," the man in the suit says.

"So?" the man with the scar says, distracted by having to look over his shoulder. Checking, Tsuna thinks. Checking to make sure that no help would be coming for Tsuna and Nagi. "We really need to get going, man. Just knock him out or something."

"No, I think it calls for a change of plans," the man in the suit says. His eyes look green from the reflection of grass off his glasses, green like money. "We're taking them both. It'll net us double the ransom money. I'll leave the other one to you, Jiro."

" _What_? Oh, geez…"

Tsuna knows what comes next. He sees it laid out before him like a long, winding path, a film that he's seen before, experienced before. He knows that he'll manage to avoid the first grab at his arm but not the second. He's too small to avoid the arm that will go around his shoulders. By the time that a hand clamps over his mouth and his nose to stifle his breathing and his screams, a countdown from ten is all that stands between reality and the nightmare that still haunts his thoughts.

He knows that when he wakes up next, there will be darkness. He will be struggling to breathe as his head is forced under water. Struggling to gasp as hands wrap around his throat. Struggling to hang onto the threads of himself as they whisper to him to become something greater than Tsuna could ever hope to be.

And by his side will be Nagi, because there won't be enough cages to hold them all. He'll learn to share with her the small space squeezed between three concrete walls and the one wall made of rusted metal bars.

_Tsunayoshi-kun_ , Nagi has never called him, but will learn to, just as how she will learn to keep track of time by counting the number of meals. She'll learn that food is the only reprieve between the horrors of being taken for their captors' games. She'll learn the guilt of watching someone else being taken and thinking, _it's not my turn today_.

That is all that awaits if these men make good on their intentions to take them both.

Reality is bright and orange when Tsuna blinks back into it. The man with the scar has just finished scratching the back of his head with an annoyed huff. The air shivers and snaps just as the man with the scar steps forward to grab ahold of Tsuna's arm. Tsuna lets him take it, but that's as far as he'll allow it to go.

The film reel snaps. If memory is to be repeated anyway, then they may as well jump to the end.

The fire pours out of him in waves of heat. He's the small and powerful nucleus of the universe that forms around him, and the world is ever eager to bend to his will, twisting the known reality to compensate for the sudden influx of flame. The grass under his feet shrivels to brown. Branches snap under the weight of the fire that catches their leaves. The men's disbelief sours the taste of air, and Nagi--

Nagi is still behind Tsuna. She's safe. Okay.

Tsuna raises his eyes, gazes outward. It's all the warning that he allows before the smell of cooked, cook _ing_ , meat punctures the stunned silence that'd settled between them.

Then, chaos.

"Jiro, oh, holy _shit!_ "

Someone is screaming. Someone else is crying, sobbing out garbled prayers. Tsuna doesn't know those voices, can't see beyond the orange to check.

But the arms that wrap around him, he knows. Those arms are as small and as frail as the morning mist, and are just as persistent. He wants to burn, wants to burn _more_ , wants to be free to do as he's been born to do, as he had been chosen to do. Except those arms won't let him, holding him tight.

_My liege._

"Tsuna-san. _Tsuna-san!_ "

That's Nagi, Tsuna remembers. That's Nagi, who had done nothing but the best by him, a fairytale that'd come to him in his time of need.

She tucks her face close to his ( _no, Nagi, don't--_ ), pressing a stream of whispers that he can't quite hear over the roar of fire in his ears. But it isn't the content of her whispers that matters but her will, the way that she doesn't flinch away when he scalds the back of her hand with his touch. She keeps holding him like he's something precious, like something worth saving. She whispers to him in lullabies that speak of her safety, her vows of his.

"Tsuna-san," Nagi whispers, and Tsuna falters; the orange breaks.

The blaze calms enough that Tsuna can twist the fire around his knuckles and yank, yanking it back like the reigns of a beast. It snarls once in protest before it decides to obey, deferring to settle back into the pressure cooker that is Tsuna's chest. He leashes the urge, this terrible need to burn, with the fraying ends of his will. He puts an active bomb to sleep, pretends that it's tame.

They collapse, just like that, with Nagi pressed to Tsuna's back. He listens to the echoes of her words in his head as he closes his eyes, as the adults appear in a swarm of white and blue uniforms.

*

The Three Criminal Brothers, as they're called, were a group of low-tier punks that specialized in theft and extortion. They were a well-known pest in Namimori and the surrounding regions, with multiple records of short-term incarceration to their names. Like mosquitoes, some would scoff, and just like mosquitoes, they were nothing if not persistent and unchanging in their incompetence and tenacity. Their progression into attempted kidnapping is shocking. Their deterioration into arson is outlandish.

That's what people write into their headlines. That's how the damage is excused.

"It wasn't us, damn it!" Ichiro, the eldest, is heard to shriek as he's led away. He jerks around in the hold of his handcuffs and his guards to point at where Tsuna is being bundled into blankets. "It was that brat! That monster, he--!"

"Don't listen to him, Tsuna-kun," an adult tells him.

How disgraceful, others will sneer. Another will say, that's what guilt does to a man. Particularly to a man who'd set fire to his younger brother in an amateur attempt at arson. Fire isn't something to be disrespected.

"She's ready to be moved," another adult announces.

Tsuna looks up. He scrambles past the startled shout of adults as he weaves himself to where Nagi is lying still on a stretcher. There are wet dressings that cover half of her face, both of her shoulders and arms. Her shirt is a crinkled brown where it should have been pristine, pretty. But even if she's no longer whole, she's here. _She's here._ Tsuna's knees almost buckle in relief.

"I'm okay, Tsuna-san," she smiles.

Tsuna curls his fingers into the stretcher and lowers his forehead against its edge. He breathes. Just breathes as the fire rumbles under his fingertips.

"Do you want to sit with Nagi-chan in the ambulance?" someone asks him gently. "Your mom can meet us at the hospital."

It's an easy question to answer. Tsuna's grateful for it.

*

Nagi's mom is a cold and distant figure swathed in bright colours and stinging scents. Her hair is picture-ready and polished, and there is not a wrinkle out of place in the composition of her clothes. She's a beautiful image made from marble, whose shoes strike the waxed surface of the hospital floor like a hammer as they carry her into Nagi's room, the thunder before the lightning of her fury.

"Mrs. Sawada, I assume?" she spits in greeting. "Please, are you quite well? What were you thinking, bringing _my daughter_ out in public without my consent?"

The disintegration of his mom's smile is rare and apocalyptic. It makes Tsuna's stomach drop to the soles of his feet. It makes his chair screech noisily behind him as he gets to his feet when the tremors borne of his protests make it difficult to sit. Nagi wraps her bandaged fingers around Tsuna's wrist.

"Can you help me up, Tsuna-san?" Nagi says quietly.

"Nagi and Tsuna--" his mom says in the meanwhile.

"I could care less what you do with your own brat, but Nagi should have seen her doctor and come straight home!" Nagi's mom snarls, taking a step forward with her bag gripped tightly to her shoulder. "What do you plan on doing about her wounds?! She was supposed to be my surprise guest on a reality show, but _well_ , I guess not!"

Tsuna's mom smiles because that's what she does when she's overwhelmed. She's done nothing but smile at Tsuna since he woke to her touch in the hospital, but never-- never like how she's smiling now. Never with a smile so plastic, pallid from being bleached dry by her disappointment.

"Your daughter," she says pleasantly, "Is believed to make a full recovery."

"Oh, you'd better hope so," Nagi's mom says with enough edges to her words to make a lesser person bleed, "You'll be hearing from my lawyers regardless, but the consequences will be _much greater_ if--"

Nagi sits up through her wince, and proceeds to hurl the room into silence with no more than a quiet murmur of, "Mother."

It's only because Nagi allows Tsuna to support half of her weight, allows him the privilege of sharing the fear that makes her fingers feel clammy through her bandages, that the realization comes to him. He turns his eyes to Nagi's mother in all of her packaged dignity and thinks, _castle._ A castle surrounded by moat and loneliness, a place to reach for. A place that Nagi must've looked upon with yearning until she figured it out.

"It's nice to see you," Nagi says. She speaks carefully, as though each intake of breath strains against the burns that Tsuna had left behind. Her fingers tighten minutely, herding his instinctive flinch away. _Stay._

_Please stay._

"But," Nagi adds, "I guess it would look quite bad if no one saw you coming to visit me after something like this."

"Mind your tongue, Nagi," her mother hisses, glowing brighter than the layer of makeup brushed over her cheeks, "What's gotten into you? Are you looking to embarrass me?"

"Yes. As much as I am able," Nagi smiles, sweet and poisonous. "Because I will never forgive you if you do anything to hurt Tsuna-san. So please do not speak to Nana-san like that."

_I figured it out._

She says, "Please leave. I will come back with our regular chauffeur when I can."

Pride is a sin that hides the vulgarity of people under its masquerade. It's a weakness that people mistake as a weapon, and Nagi's mother falters under that very folly as she fails to stare down the challenge cast by her daugher and the resolution that supports it. She is left with no other option but to sniff and promise Nagi a stern talking to upon their return to a home that Nagi corrects as a house. Nagi's mother is not a stupid person; she could not be Nagi's mother otherwise. The correction does not go unnoticed, and she walks off while leaving Tsuna to wonder if she'd regret digging her painted nails into the straps of her bag with such force. Both seemed frightfully expensive.

Tsuna yelps as Nagi goes limp with her trust, forfeiting all that she is for Tsuna to carry. It takes a little maneuvering, but Tsuna makes due, crawling onto the bed to better hold up their combined weights.

"Mother will be angry," Nagi tells Tsuna when Tsuna's mom has excused herself to find some water at Nagi's request. She shivers. "So I… I probably can't see you for a while, Tsuna-san."

Tsuna doesn't comment on the wet patch on his shirt, and Nagi says nothing of the many times that he has to swallow before he can think to respond. "How… how long?"

Nagi shakes her head against him. "Even if it takes me a while, I'll come back. Please believe me." _Please let me stay when I do_.

"No take-backs," Tsuna tells her through his hiccups.

She giggles on cue, high-pitched and watery and so, so wonderful.

*

Nagi leaves the hospital four days later after Tsuna wrangles a stern promise from her team of doctors and nurses that her burns aren't serious. The marks will be minimal. Her pain will fade. She will be alright, cross our hearts, hope to die.

(The second brother is still trying to find his lungs in another hospital, he also overhears. The man will likely lose function in no small number of limbs. They might have to amputate. It'd taken them three days to find his eyes from the mushy mess of his face. How horrible. How deserving.)

They call Nagi a miracle; no other girl could have gotten better so quickly from what sounded like a hideous fire.

"I know," Tsuna says, and earns himself a piece of candy for it. Nurses could be terribly weird.

The car that is waiting for Nagi outside is sleek and blue. The man that steps out of the driver's seat is a middle-aged man with a funny bald spot on his right temple. He greets Nagi with kind words and tender relief. His colours are honest. It makes it easier to let Nagi go.

She touches Tsuna's cheek with her new fingertips, shiny and pale from their rebirth. "Take care, Tsuna-san. I'll see you soon."


	2. Hibari Kyouya, I

A week passes. Two. Three, then four. It takes eight weeks of waiting and asking before Tsuna accepts his mom's careful suggestions that Nagi is gone. Lost to him until time deems it long enough for Nagi to find her way back. Remember, Tsuna-san. Not for a while yet.

"How do you feel about that, Tsuna?" a doctor (another doctor, not the doctor that he likes) asks when he mentions it, off-hand. Triumph twists their face into something brazen and eager; it's an easy read from the lines around their eyes, the slight catch to their words. _A breakthrough_ , they would probably say, because it's been awhile since he's said anything of significance, their type of significance.

But that's not Tsuna's fault. He doesn't feel guilty over it, because he knows it's not. After all, there's only so many ways in which Tsuna can say _I don't remember_ when they ask him about the events of the park. Only so many times that he feels up to repeating the truth.

There's also no coherence to what Tsuna _can_ remember, and there's nothing worth sharing about the jumbled images in his head, those of heat, Nagi, and the world ending under his feet. The world ends under his feet every night in his dreams, besides. That's not so much of a memory as it's an old story. It's not a story that Tsuna should have to tell.

"I feel sad," Tsuna says dutifully because by now, he knows what constitutes as the right answer.

He doesn't think to tell them how Nagi's absence doesn't bother him, not really. How the doctors are blowing it out of proportion, weaving their separation as a tale of loss. Separation is the sting that comes with getting cut between the fingers; loss will bleed and fester until it changes you. They're vastly different things, and this distance between Tsuna and Nagi-- this is separation. It's just a cut. Nagi had pledged to him, she'd _said_ , I'll come back. I'll come back, please believe me, and it'd be easier to stop breathing than to do otherwise.

But the nuances of that answer is too intimate to share, too complicated for the amount of words that Tsuna can spare. So he says _I'm sad_ like he's expected to say. It's easier that way.

*

"Tsu-kun?"

Tsuna peels his eyes open from where he'd fallen asleep on the living room floor, where he'd been using the storybook of knights and princesses as his pillow. His mom's smile looks-- different, somehow, a little weird with how it's stretched taut at the corners. Worry curls its fingers around Tsuna's lungs until his mom reaches down to tuck a lock of hair behind Tsuna's hair, soft with affection.

"Dinnertime," she says.

The sun had been high and bright in the sky when Tsuna had first opened his book. The living room lamps hadn't been lit when he'd closed his eyes last. It feels as though it'd only been minutes since lunch.

Oh well. Tsuna yawns. "Okay."

Dinner is a simple affair, simple and enjoyable as it's always been. Gathering the dishes to put them in the sink is a task that Tsuna must've done a hundred times by now, but tonight, they slip out of his hands when he trips on the flat surface of the kitchen floor. His mom's startled yell, _Tsu-kun!_ , draws Tsuna's eyes wide open as he falls towards the shattered ceramic on the floor. The clarity of her distress makes the world go sharp.

It makes things go bright for the first time in months.

Tsuna blinks where he's seated on the ground. His mom is hugging him, wrapped around him while whispering soft little nothings that guides him to breathe, _one, two. That's it, Tsu-kun_.

The floor around Tsuna is pristine. There is no evidence of an accident, no leftover pieces of his mom's favourite plates. There isn't even ashes left over.

"I'm sorry," Tsuna stutters out. "I'm-- I'm sorry, mom."

"Oh, Tsu-kun," his mom laughs, watery and terrible, "No need for that. They were so old, you know? It's about time that I replaced them. You'll just have to come with me to pick out some new ones."

"Okay." Tsuna tucks his nose into his mom's shoulder. He says again, "Okay."

*

It happens again on a Saturday, a few hours before the sun will be awake enough to sing its hello's. The grass feels cool against his toes when Tsuna steps out into their backyard. There's a freshness to the air that tastes like pre-emptive forgiveness as he looks up to a sky that looks so much like the sky of his dream, endless and clear. Like acceptance as the colours sharpen.

And Tsuna thinks, _just for a little bit_.

He's always been a little bit broken, Tsuna knows, ever since the nightmares of his small room had started however many eternities ago. But it's the kind of break that's deep enough for Tsuna to hide for as long as there were reasons to pretend. For his mom, mostly. For Nagi, for when she'd been there. He knows how to handle it, contain it, for them.

That's not how he feels today. Today, he feels splintered, broken _open_ without the glue to hold back the the fire that has always hovered close. It makes him-- itch, almost, with the urge to burn. It makes it difficult to think about anything else, makes it difficult to even sleep. It's why he'd tiptoed downstairs, why he's out _here_ , under the sleepy sun. Here, away from his mom and the walls that try to close him in. Because here, he can burn. He can burn as he wants to burn, as the world to _needs_ him to burn.

_Just for a little bit._

A part of him flinches at the orange that slips over his mind at his allowance, the colours of fire that dance across his eyes. What awaits him when he closes his eyes is the story of a dead man, the death of the man with the scar who'd tried to fight off the aftermaths of an unforgiving fire and died. So, too, comes the memory of a ruined small room, and how the fire had raged in his stead, tearing through flesh and bone to leave behind an explosion of ash and dust. In Tsuna's ears rings the silence of those unable to scream as he becomes the last and only one standing. Again and again.

It's awful. It's worse than the first time.

When he crumbles, he crumbles knees first. Then it's a matter of course to slump onto his side as he fights off the that fire that still, _still_ , tries to burn. He curls his legs in tight to hold himself together as he freefalls into sleep.

He comes awake to the sound of a voice, a guiding hand through the fire and the anarchy that it governs.

"Tsu-kun?"

A voice. His name. Warmth, and stability. _Mom._

"That's right, Tsu-kun." A pause, a moment to think. "Mom is going to touch you, okay? Is that okay?"

She doesn't ever cry anymore, Tsuna remembers. Because of him. _For_ him, she doesn't cry, only smiles. Tsuna holds still as the clammy skin of her hands touches his face, cups his cheek. The fever breaks.

"Hello, caterpillar," his mom smiles. It's a funny smile, a sloppy mirror image of something else.

Tsuna tilts his head, trying to angle it right. "Mom?"

His mom's hand moves up into his hair. Tsuna remembers not to flinch. He smiles shyly as she does a funny little waddle that brings her a few steps closer to him, never breaking the crouch that lets him keep track of her eyes. When she curls her arm around his shoulders, he lets her pull him up, pull him in, and snuffles into the familiarity of her scent. Lets her whispers distract him from how the grass under his body is now brown and fragile, crinkled like paper.

"Oh, you could have caught your death out here," his mom tsks. She grunts as she picks him up and giggles at his startled squeal as he scrabbles for purchase. He's bounced twice as she adjusts for his weight, then twice more as she rocks them back and forth, back and forth.

"Mom!" Tsuna squeaks.

"Are you still here, Tsu-kun?" his mom asks. Her voice sounds odd, muffled and congested. She swallows between every other word. Her words are shaking when she asks him next, "Are you still my little caterpillar?"

Tsuna bites his lower lip and stretches out an arm behind her head to spread his fingers out wide. He wiggles them, then counts. Yep, all five, all accounted for. He's still here.

"I'm here," Tsuna says. "I was just-- I was dreaming, and I hurt--"

"Shh, hush. Your dreams aren't real, Tsu-kun," his mom tells him, soothing as a spell. Like the spell that his dad had also pressed into his hair. "You and me, we're a team, hm? We won't let it be real."

_You won't burn the world_ , his mom isn't saying. _You won't burn all that I love_.

Tsuna doesn't have the courage to ask if he's part of what she's asking him to spare, so he doesn't. He just nods against her shoulder, slow enough not to scare her even further. "I know, mom. I-- I really do, I promise."

She kisses his forehead. "Breakfast is ready," she says. Back to normal, just like that. Her smile is also normal by the next time that he can see her face, set properly in place. That calms him better than her words or her kisses ever could. "I hope you're excited, today is French Toast Friday!"

Hunger isn't what's gnawing on his stomach, but if his mom has already cooked, then Tsuna should eat. He doesn't want to disappoint her again.

*

Except, it keeps happening. That splintered part of him can't seem to quite fit in with the rest of him, and it grates at him, destroying the edges that had once set Tsuna apart from the fire that lurks beneath his skin.

Consciousness becomes a daily struggle, a plague against his self-given task of restraining the impulse to burn, burn, _burn_. He does his best with it, but his best is a hollow promise, cheap and fleeting. Because Tsuna forgets, sometimes, on why he shouldn't; the reasons always feel a little trivial against the need to ease the heaviness that chokes his chest.

Only the colours that slip over his mind from time to time seems to be strong enough of a reason, the only one that's resilient enough to last. Enough of him still balks at the fire to hold it at bay. It's but a small source of relief; every hour that he spends awake leaves him exhausted from his vigil, too tired to feel much of anything. Tired, and uneasy. Unsure of what might be the trigger that could leave his backyard barren and brown.

So, he sleeps. Tsuna finds both irony and sanctuary in his dreams, finding comfort in the predictability of them. For in his dreams, there are no consequences to setting the world and its people ablaze. It's an elegant solution. Effective. _Easy_.

It's a solution that Tsuna finds himself exploiting to the point of dependence, so much so that he starts slipping in and out of focus even when awake. He starts tripping over nothing. He runs into things. He drops several more cups and plates until his mom gently, firmly, dissuades him from picking up after himself. These little accidents are a small price to pay for how it slows the episodes of the disappearing incidents, the unintentional blackouts. His mom eventually learns to stop trying to wake him, letting him sleep for as long as she dares.

*

The doctors are in a tizzy, twittering with worry.

_Decreased appetite. Low energy. Difficulty concentrating._

It's odd how they just _know_ , even when Tsuna's gotten so much better at crafting answers that say nothing at all. He could have sworn that he'd only said that he was sleeping more, hadn't even said how _much_ more, just that it'd been _more_. They're always doing this, always seeing things that Tsuna doesn't want them to see. It's weird. A little creepy. (And away from where they can see, Tsuna presses his palms over his eyes. Presses down against an old, old wound from a time before he'd carried a nightmare in his memories and the fire in his dreams.)

These doctors, they start talking about sending Tsuna (back) to school. A public school, where kids are planted to grow, watered by expectations and rules. Where Tsuna could meet and be around kids his age. It's for Tsuna's own good, they say, because you can't protect him forever, Nana-san. You shouldn't have to.

"Oh, hush," Tsuna's mom says. She's smiling at them, but her hands are steepled tight on her lap. "I wouldn't mind at all if I'd had to. He's my little caterpillar."

They smile back, tolerant and pitying. They say, "A change of pace may be just what he needs to carry him through this setback."

_Nagi_ , Tsuna tries not to say in correction. Her name is _Nagi_ , not his setback.

They tell his mom, "This is a natural step in his recovery."

"How do you feel about going back to school, Tsuna?" they ask him next, when they get him alone, "And trying to make more friends? Being around other people?"

Tsuna blinks at them, sleepy and distantly interested. He closes his eyes and leans back into his thoughts. He's never forgotten about school, about the shy joy of being around other children. He can still remember the old, old desire for the delight of inclusion. His want of birthday parties and sleepovers.

Hope is a disease. Tsuna knows this, someone _told_ him this, but it's still a hard feeling to fight.

At the very least, school would give his mom some time away from Tsuna and more time for herself. It would save her the fright of having to watch him slip further away into sleep for a few hours. Saves her from worrying about when Tsuna might break next. Any number of those reasons, any _one_ of those reasons, would make school worth the effort.

So he says, "Okay."

He later finds himself telling his mom, "I'm sure, mom. I just… I just want to try."

A week later, he stands at the front of a classroom and sees more people than he feels that he's ever seen. Their eyes are bright with interest, and the noise of their whispers is both welcoming and taxing. Everything about them is small, soft. Flammable.

Vulnerable, and all the more dangerous for it. Tsuna hangs onto the fire tight, _tight_ , and reminds himself not to burn.

*

For some reason that Tsuna can't comprehend, they like him. They really do.

There's no small degree of curiosity to the lot of them, but their affections are odd in how bountiful it is, how genuine. They try to engage him in small pockets of conversation and their singular pursuit for laughter and play. They're uncontrolled with their energy in a way that Nagi had never been, winding each other up into newer heights of frenzy. It's all very strange.

They reach for him, and he reaches back. He grabs onto the inclusion that he's always sought, and it's _amazing_. He only has to walk into a room for a dozen faces turn to him with smiles, for a handful of them to want to do whatever Tsuna might feel up to doing. He's not sure what it is that draws them in when he'd been shunned, once upon a time, but he doesn't think anything of it until he's one week into this new rhythm of his.

He's not sure what triggers it. A word, maybe. The way that they can lean in too close, looming over him like the shadows of men in suits. The curl of fingers around his forearm. Something makes the bars of his small room rise up around him, and then--

And then, an eraser catches on fire.

"Oh my God!" someone shrieks, leaping out of their chair. Many others follow suit, and the clamor of their falling chairs is startling enough that Tsuna's control slips, ever slightly.

Soft, flammable. None of them are worthy as Nagi had been. No one with resolutions strong enough to shoulder the weight of fire and a lifelong devotion to the Will that Tsuna will-- eventually--

The slide of red over his eyes is like a plunge into ice despite the roar of the fire in his ears, and Tsuna slams it down.

The eraser fire is put out by a frantic teacher while other members of staff herd the rest of his class to the safety of the outdoors. The school loses nothing more than a desk and their slow, daily routines for the while that the local news sniffs around, building their headlines. By the end of it, it's just an odd little incident to be remembered, forgotten. It's not a big deal.

"Tsu-kun?" his mom asks when she hears.

"I'm okay. I didn't--" _hurt anyone_ , she wouldn't want to hear. Just a dream, remember. Not real. "No one got hurt."

His mom smiles, tolerant of everything that Tsuna is not saying. She's used to it, probably.

*

It's not as though he shuts them out entirely, after that. He's not rejecting them, but he also stops making the mistake of trying to accept them.

He turns away from eye contact. Shies away from their touch. He puts his head down and closes his eyes to dim the volume of their words. He sleeps. He sleeps _a lot_ , a lot more than he actually intends.

It's frustrating; he can see it on their faces. He's a challenge, a toy that he'd allowed them to have before he'd taken himself away. That's okay, though; they'll learn. He's not-- he's not _fun_ , only new, and even that will fade. They'll grow to see that, in time.

Within a couple of weeks, they start discovering the limits to his focus, the vastness of his inattention. They watch as Tsuna can't stay awake long enough in class to pick up on his studies, can't focus on his feet long enough to manage more than a few steps forward before gravity grabs hold to try to yank him down. He drifts through the minutes and the hours in little snapshots, fudging up the smallest of tasks as a result. He's suddenly not cool to hang around anymore, and that helps. It makes most of them stay away.

Some are easier to convince than others though. Some of them, they just won't give up.

"Yo, Loner Tsuna," one of them says, gruff with his unease. The whole of this boy is tense, braced for dismissal like a neglected animal. "Do you want to go to the arcade with me and my gang later? Like, you're still the new kid, and don't have any friends, right? So we'd be doing… you a favour, or-- or something! So--!"

Tsuna loses track of whatever else that might have been said, and he doesn't think it'd be very polite to ask someone to repeat themselves when he's just going to refuse anyway. So he looks at the boy's shirt (a print of some movie that had just come out, widely popular for its light-sword fighting), and shakes his head. He puts his head down.

Or, well. He tries. What happens next is what breaks the uneasy equilibrium between Tsuna and his suitors. It's an accident. Of a sort, anyway.

"Stop ignoring me!" the boy yells, and he shoves at Tsuna with enough force to make Tsuna half-topple out of his chair, spilling him onto the floor.

Tsuna winces upon impact, and there's a flurry of noise as his classmates start passing the knives of gossip around to each other. The offender looks shellshocked when Tsuna finally, _finally_ , looks up at him with a type of clear focus that only pain and discomfort could bring. The boy is mumbling out half-formed apologies when their eyes meet, and the boy, he-- freezes. Just freezes. Then, his face floods with colour.

It's just. It's _bizarre_. The blush that dusts the boy's cheeks reminds him of how Nagi had also bloomed a little more each time that he'd looked at her. How her confidence had grown in tandem with her importance even when they'd say almost nothing at all to each other, fueled only by Tsuna's need for her presence.

When Tsuna looks away, says, _it's okay_ to the stuttered apologies of his offender and closes off from the spectacle of the moment, there is palpable, potent disappointment.

It's nauseating. Corrosive. _Contagious_.

*

On another day, after that day, they do it again. They bump into him. Shoves at him. Again and again and _again_ , though it's not always done by the same people. It feels as though they're all seeking something from him, the answer to which feels always out of reach.

When someone takes his notebook and steps on it, Tsuna can't help but look at them too, trying to work out the frustration that pricks at the back of his eyes. He doesn't cry, there are worse things that (could) have been done to him, but he looks. He looks upon them with nothing warm or welcoming, but even that seems to be a step in the preferable direction. He learns that it's best to just ignore them, after that.

Besides, it's not as though any of his tormentors are particularly creative with their baiting. They never leave him with irrevocable damage. They're like mosquitoes, and like the buzz of mosquitoes, they're just pesky and persistent. That's all.

"They're trying to get your attention, Tsuna-kun," his teacher says in response when Tsuna dares to turn to them for help, just once. They're not like the doctors or the nurses that he's come to know, those of whom can sometimes hear what Tsuna cannot bring himself to say. He shouldn't expect these teachers to know anything at all, really. That's not fair to them. They owe him nothing but the lessons that they write on their boards.

Try to be friends with them, the teachers say with a smile. It's normal that they do this. They're just pulling at pigtails, which doesn't make sense; Tsuna can barely get his hair to stay on his head, much less tie it down.

Tsuna wrinkles his nose, accepts it as a wasted effort, and moves on.

_Loner Tsuna,_ the kids continue to call him. There are other variations, like _Loser Tsuna_ and _No-Good Tsuna_ , but _Loner Tsuna_ seems to catch on the fastest, the most popular. It becomes the basis of what he overhears to be the "Tsuna Game", the goal of which feels no different from toddlers seeking the affection of fire. It's dangerous. It's-- it's _stupid_. The fire inside his chest tempts him with the solution of setting them all aflame, but, no. _No_ , he tells it. That's _exactly his point_ , exactly what Tsuna is trying to prevent.

It's all very tiring. All very good reasons to keep sleeping, to stay asleep for as long as he needs. (It's never quite enough.)

_Sleepy Tsuna_ , others begin to call him. They're the kinder ones. They help make school bearable whenever Tsuna is awake enough to experience it. Some even break the mold to help him, lending him a hand when he trips. Like that girl in class 2-B who smiles like the sun.

He looks straight at her, at the raw brilliance of this girl, and smiles, shy. "Thanks."

And then, there's Hibari Kyouya.

*

Class had fallen way into the lunch hour for about twenty minutes when it happens, when Tsuna finds himself cornered under the shadows of a tree, nibbling at a spoonful of rice. He looks up to see some number of nondescript upperclassmen, and the events therein doesn't bear mentioning. Cloud-watching is more riveting than paying tribute to their antics, dime a dozen as they'd become. It's easy to fall into the rhythm of it, the soreness that their feigned animosity leaves on his skin.

Tsuna drifts in and out of his daze until the sound of a yelp coaxes him back. A yelp, one of his own. It's sharp, strangled out of his throat in protest at how his lunch is being ripped out of his hands to be shared amongst the upperclassmen.

His attention snap to them. _He looks_ , and that's on him. That's his mistake.

They pause as people like them often do when they find success in their game, and their faces glow with triumph. Their elation doesn't allow them to sneer, but they can grin. They can laugh, and they do.

"Aw, don't cry, Tsuna- _chan_ ," they taunt as they chew, "It's just rice and eggrolls. They're not even that good."

Rice and eggrolls and the sound of his mom's humming in the morning.

_I hope you like it, Tsu-kun!_

It's just lunch until it's _not_ , not when Tsuna can recall the taste of lukewarm soup served in an old metal lunch tray. The press of the concrete against his knees as he crouches around the food together with another boy. As he looks through the bars of their small room for the hands that might take them away.

Tsuna scrubs at his eyes as laughter jars his ears. His chest goes tight and so, so hot at the dismissal of his mom's care, at the insult that it is.

The silence is heavy when it descends. The afternoon goes cold. The syllables of spoken words become stretched taut and incomprehensible as things slow down, as Tsuna takes a step forward with his fingers curled in tight. It's a step that brings him close enough to see the whites of the pests' eyes, to the alarm and the doubts that reflect back at him as the world flashes bright.

Just a swat, he thinks. Just a swat to knock the bugs out of the air.

There's no need for doubt, the fire whispers to him. This is your right.

*

Tsuna knows of Hibari Kyouya because _everyone_ knows of Hibari Kyouya. He's infamous in the worst of ways, notorious for his unbending will and senseless rules. He governs the hierarchy of the school from the top, a menace that prowls the hallways with confidence that not even the teachers can break. Age is all that separates the adults from Hibari Kyouya, but age alone is not enough to usurp his rights as the apex predator of their ecosystem. It's easier to bend and obey him, they say, than to fight a battle that will leave you bruised and humiliated.

For Tsuna, the bigger problem lies in the fact that scavengers are not an uncommon sight around apex predators, and within Namimori Elementary, there are many. The _Tsuna Game_ is still in style, and his tormentors can range from those that leave trash in his locker to those that actively seek to intimidate and wound. But whatever species of scavenger that they might be, he learns that they're universally wary of Hibari's presence.

Tsuna learns of Hibari Kyouya as a consequence of this hierarchy, and the easy solution that it provides. He learns to sleep on the roof during lunch, in a corner hidden by the afternoon shade. He navigates the school by the hallways that Hibari likes to patrol. It's not a catch-all solution, but it works well enough. Because as much as there appears to understanding of the roles of the small-time opportunists in his kingdom, Hibari Kyouya still finds them disruptive and unreasonably infuriating. And Hibari Kyouya, one is quick to learn, is neither known for his mercy nor his patience.

Which likely explains why there are bodies lying at Hibari's feet, defeated and groaning. Tsuna's role in the whole matter, not so much.

There are four of them, the bodies of flies. Flies whose swarm had been struck down. One comes awake with a moan, an eye cracking open just as his lips part around the definitive shape of an _oh_.

_Oh._ Of course it was Hibari Kyouya. Loner, loser Tsuna couldn't have done _this_ to anyone.

The bento box closes with a quiet _click_ in Tsuna's hands.

Seconds pass as do the minutes, and then Tsuna snaps awake to the blunt force trauma that strikes his stomach, bleaching out the colours and dyeing the world back to its safer, grayer hues. It's like gasping awake after his dreams of fire, trying to make sense of his scrambled senses as he's reminded of his place, of _this_ place, where the people are real, where they can die.

Of how he's still at school, where he has no right to command the fate of others. (Not yet, not until he's ready, whenever that may be.)

A shadow falls over his face, and Tsuna braces with the expectation of another blow. But Hibari seems disinclined to deal it, standing over Tsuna like a terrible, violent guardian deity. Tsuna stares up at him with wide, wild confusion as Hibari stares back with all of the ferocity that he was born to wield.

"You," Hibari says. The tonfas in his hands are still poised and ready, gleaming bright even when the shadows of intrigue distracts Hibari into cocking his head like a raptor, a predator, a case of curiosity with claws.

The considering tilt of Hibari's head is gone when Tsuna blinks next, and Hibari isn't there at all when Tsuna tries to manage the effort of sitting up, sweeping past the bodies without a glance to spare.

There's a collective sigh of relief when Hibari's steps fade off to the general noise of day, and it's only then that someone finally moans, "My _spleen_."

*

"How's school going, Tsuna?"

There are any number of ways that Tsuna could probably answer this question, none of which will be quite right. This question is too broad, has too many answers that could be correct, too many that would invite further interrogation. Tsuna knows what they _want_ to hear, but that has no bearing on what they _expect_ to hear. It's a tricky business, keeping these doctors happy.

He could tell the doctor about the teachers who are a comedy of effortful errors, about their misguided attempts at kindness. He could tell the doctor about the pity that he sees reflected in their eyes, the pity that underlies their handling of him. They see him as a child whose pieces are kept together by tape and glue, someone who might thus come apart at any moment. How they're of the ilk that sees him for what he is, and rejects him in subtle ways. Like by not looking at him, never directly. Like never asking if he's okay. Like turning a blind eye to the games that Tsuna's peers continue to play.

Tsuna supposes he could tell the doctor about the Tsuna Game too. He could ask them about what it is about him that might have entice people to create the game at all. They might have the answer to why, _how,_ these children can not see and feel the fire that he carries into their school every day, the inherent danger therein.

He could tell them all of that, as well as how he still wants to keep trying to fit into this foreign world. Because every time that he comes home from school to say _I'm home_ like a normal son, does his homework like a _good_ son, his mom's face lights up brighter than all the lamps in their house. He could tell them how Tsuna would endure more for less.

"I'm learning a lot," Tsuna finally says.

"Your mom mentioned that you came home with a bruise the other day," the doctor says, "Will you talk to me about it?"

A bruise? "Which one?" Tsuna makes the mistake to say.

The doctor's next words are carefully absent of any inflections when they say, "Any of them. Whichever one you'd like to tell me about."

Tsuna presses a hand over his stomach. Presses down against the sharp discomfort of disturbing the bruise underneath. He has a few more around his wrists and arms and shoulders, but those aren't as interesting as the one under his hand. "Okay, um. Well, this one, I got from a--" A raptor, a predator, a case of curiosity with claws, "A bird, I think."

"What kind of bird?" the doctor asks dutifully. No inflection still, but Tsuna knows that they don't believe him. That's okay. It makes it easier to talk about it, in a way.

"A bird that eats other animals," Tsuna says. "He got angry that he had to clean up after me, I guess. I made a mess of his home. It was…" _my fault,_ but saying that would make the doctor want to talk about how it's _not_ Tsuna's fault and Tsuna doesn't want to to do that today. "It was an accident. He was just… he was just reacting."

_How does that make you feel?_ they would ask next.

Sure enough, "And how do you feel about that?"

Tsuna stretches out his legs on the chair and stares at the tips of his shoes. He shrugs. "That I need to say thank you?"

*

There's something to be said about actively, consciously, seeking out a force of nature bred for violence; it takes courage, but mostly, perseverance. That, and optimism.

Tsuna asks exactly one student and one teacher about the whereabouts of Hibari Kyouya, and it takes about an hour after that for the entire school to know about that silly student of class 2-C and his fool's errand. At the very least, it gives Tsuna ample excuse to plead absence from his next two classes; he'll just say, _Hibari-san_ , and the teachers will go pale with understanding. They'll jump to the erroneous conclusion that Tsuna had spent that time in the infirmary, because that's just how it is in Namimori Elementary.

He blinks awake to the sight of a brewing storm on Hibari's face, brief but frightening like lightning. Tsuna hadn't meant to fall asleep, but that's a moot point, really. Mostly, he's surprised to be conscious. Conscious, and free of any tonfa-related hemorrhaging.

"Sawada Tsunayoshi," Hibari says at last, because _of course_ Hibari knows his name. Every ripple has a name, and Hibari is nothing if not clear in his business in stomping them flat. He probably has a list.

"You are expected in class," Hibari says next, which likely explained his irritation; Hibari seems to find few things as annoying as prey that dares to step outside of Namimori's, _his_ , rules.

_So are you,_ Tsuna absolutely _does not_ say. He sits up and says instead, "I know, but I was looking for, um, for you."

Hibari narrows his eyes, but doesn't otherwise react. Doesn't reach for his tonfas, which is as good as permission for Tsuna to continue.

"I, uh. Thank you," Tsuna says. Mumbles, really. "For the-- for helping me the other day."

Hibari looks at him blankly. Uncomprehending. "That wasn't for you."

"I know," Tsuna says. _He was just reacting_ , he'd told the doctors. "But I still wanted to tell you, um."

Thank you, he'd wanted to say. Thank you for putting out the fire that he had not, could not, for smudging out the sparks of colour that had danced across his sight. Thank you for the bruises that had kept him grounded. Thank you ( _damn you_ ) for not letting him burn, bringing him back to where he wants (not) to be.

He's not going to say any of that. Tsuna doesn't owe Hibari the truth, only honesty. It's a resolution that won't leave him, won't let him leave, until Hibari accepts what he's owed.

It's weird to feel so stubborn, but not so much that it feels unpleasant.

"Just-- thank you," Tsuna says with all the willpower that he could forage.

The pause that drifts into the space between them is long and awkward, and the thoughts that take form on Hibari's face are far too quick and complicated for Tsuna to catch. Tsuna tries not to drown in that silence, waiting for the moment when Hibari finally seems ready to snort and incline his head. Message received, though otherwise dismissed.

Tsuna doesn't think to ask for more than that.

"… If you're finished," Hibari says, and that would be it, the final act of this odd little moment on the roof. His hands fall to his belt, to where the tonfas are hooked and ready. "Namimori's rules are not meant to be broken as you see fit. I expect you came prepared."

Tsuna expects it to hurt.

It hurts way worse than he expects, but much less than he remembers.

*

Thing is, that should've been it between Tsuna and Hibari Kyouya.

Predictably, it isn't, because Tsuna's life follows a certain formula, and predictable isn't it.

The bell had barely a chance to fade when people begin pouring out of the classroom, with Tsuna at the tail-end of the rush. He's barely made a step out of the door when fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt, the only warning that he gets before he's yanked up to be dragged off by the collar of his uniform.

"Uh! Hi-- Hibari-san!?" Tsuna squeaks, stumbling over his own feet as he fights to support his own weight, as he's hauled off like prey. The rest of his flock stares at them, at _him_ , with wide eyes and wider jaws as he disappears from their sights.

Hibari parts the hallway crowds with nothing more than a glance, cutting out a path with ease. Tsuna dares to drag his feet for all of two seconds before Hibari tightens his grip in an obvious, audible threat, and Tsuna diverts his efforts into finishing his silent goodbyes instead. He even gets a letter to Nagi halfway drafted by the time that they reach the rooftop (the rooftop, again), Hibari's favoured napping spot and now, Tsuna's grave.

Tsuna flinches when the door to the roof is slammed open and shut. Winces when Hibari hardly takes a step forward before spinning around to pin Tsuna to it by the front of his shirt.

Ah, the sky is a clear blue today. It's nice. Nicer still that Tsuna gets to see it one last time, moments before his death.

"You," Hibari snarls, then stops. He stops as he'd stopped that day under the sun, as he'd stopped on the roof, cocking his head like the hawk metaphor that just won't leave. "You knew."

Uh, what? "Um?" Tsuna says.

Hibari's eyes goes half-mast with his accusation, his intrigue, a forecast of the foreboding things to come. "That day, with the herbivores. You knew that the only person I bit was you."

Tsuna considers lying for the moment that it takes to shake his head, to shake himself free of the thought. He should've thought it through a little more though; it made him _shake his head_ , as if he's shaking his head in answer. Which is absolutely the wrong answer, because it makes the annoyed crease between Hibari's eyes deepen with his scowl, looking almost painful with how deep it's starting to cut into the skin.

"You thanked me for it," Hibari says flatly. Disgusted by the very memory of it, appalled to find himself having to _say_ it. Surprised, too, maybe, that he said it at all.

It's not funny, Tsuna tells himself, stern. Hibari Kyouya's ire is _not funny_. "No, sorry, um. That's not what I, uh." He takes a moment. "It was still something to thank you for."

_Even if they hurt you?_ Nagi had murmured.

_Will you talk to me about it?_ the doctor would ask of him.

"I don't want it," Hibari Kyouya is saying, which.

Tsuna stares at him. "What?"

"I don't _want it_ ," Hibari growls, wearing what may have been petulance on anyone else as nothing more than irritation, the last straw that breaks his tenuous grasp on the virtue of patience.

"But--" Tsuna starts, stops, staring bewildered at a glare that would have otherwise frightened him. It's getting increasingly difficult as _not_ to grab back at Hibari, to avoid getting a tonfa to the face because of a silly need to _argue back_ \-- "Isn't it easier to just say _you're welcome_?"

Oh. He's arguing back anyway.

Hibari's glower is a thing to behold on a nice, sunny day like today. Almost like getting whipped into the fury of a flash storm, one with clouds so black that it'd look cartoonish.

"You're placing yourself in my debt," Hibari says after a moment. More calmly, even. Should Tsuna feel worried about this? "For what?"

"For--" For not letting him burn. For waking him up. ( _Waking him up?_ ) Sentiments _still_ not worth sharing. Words that he doesn't want to speak to anyone but Nagi, who would accept them even if she could not understand them. Tsuna swallows. "For something that's important. To me."

Hibari's glare continues for as long as it needs to ease into a stare, and Tsuna tries not to squirm too much in Hibari's grip throughout it. He almost reaches up to skim his fingers against Hibari's knuckles when Hibari snorts and-- lets him go? And walks away?

"Er," Tsuna says even when he should know better than to interrupt his own escape route, "Hibari-san, you're not--?" _Going to ask?_

"You would lie," Hibari says from where he'd walked away by four whole steps. To where he could bask under the sunlight when he rolls onto his back, hands folded behind his head.

"No, I--" Tsuna would lie. Tsuna would _definitely_ lie if silence was something that could be robbed of him, if he couldn't run. Tsuna tests his balance and stumbles forward by a step himself. Just, he has no idea what he's doing, but. "But couldn't you just--" _Beat it out of me_ \-- "Make me? Tell you?"

At that, Hibari finally turns his head, looking as blank-faced as one could be when questioned about the logistics of walking, breathing.

"You would _lie_ ," Hibari says again with brutal, pinpoint aplomb, "Because a carnivore is not what you fear."

Carnivore. Predator. Hibari Kyouya. Hibari Kyouya thought that someone of Tsuna's character was without fear of someone like _him_?

"Er," Tsuna says again after he reclaims his voice from his disbelief, "Then thank you for--"

Hibari raises his tonfas in approximation of fangs, bared in palpable warning.

Um, okay.

"--reminding me to go to class?" Tsuna tries.

Hibari seems to consider this, then accepts it with a grunt. He closes his eyes. "You have two minutes."

Tsuna goes to class.

*

A month into the curriculum of trying to be normal, Tsuna comes to a certain realization that, for all of its unpredictability, his life was built on a series of (un)fortunate repetitions.

His nightmare, for one. His dreams bore no mentioning. His mom. His meetings with Nagi when he was still allowed to have them. _Hibari Kyouya._ Hibari Kyouya and his penchant for leaving bodies in his wake. In _Tsuna's_ wake.

The first time that it happens, Tsuna comes awake to the taste of grass and the sun. His arms are starting to lose feeling from where they are pinned underneath him, numb despite the way that the doctors shake their heads at his lack of weight every month. It's a problem that they can't seem to fix, which kind of fits with their struggle to nurture Tsuna's ability to be whole, actually.

Tsuna startles at the sound of a groan. Not his own, but close enough to tickle at his ears. When he turns his head, he sees a face that he most definitely does not recognize, though he probably should; those of the same fate, and all. He rolls away from that face and onto his back when the boy seems to stir, discouraging the temptation for eye contact while it's still effortless to do so.

Easing up onto his elbows turns out to be a contest of wills with how fiercely his left side is starting to ache, but it's not anything that Tsuna can't push through. There's enough purpose to sitting up that it makes it worth it. How else would he look upon what appears to be a carnage of Hibari Kyouya's design? He looks in hopes of understanding Hibari's reason to do this. He looks without the expectation to succeed.

Hibari looks relaxed and regal when he surveys his work, as though he hadn't just beaten black eyes into the faces of older, bigger, boys. He even looks _bored_ , at least until his gaze finally lands on Tsuna and suddenly looks anything but.

It's a little terrifying.

"Will you also thank me for this, Sawada Tsunayoshi?" Hibari asks.

"Um," Tsuna says after a moment. Hesitant, hesitat _ing_. There's a touch of wryness, a challenge, that lurk underneath Hibari's words, words that form one question while asking another entirely. Tsuna doesn't wonder at how he might know this, how he can be so sure, not when the bigger problem of having _no idea_ what Hibari might be looking for looms over him like the end.

This is about five times more difficult than navigating the landmines of the doctors' questions. But then again: Hibari Kyouya.

Carefully, slowly, Tsuna says, "Do you want me to? Say, um, thank you?"

Hibari scowls. "No."

"Then I won't," Tsuna says in relief. This _really_ isn't anything to thank anyone for. "I definitely won't."

"Do it, and get bitten to death," Hibari says in fair warning.

What even was this conversation? "I'm not! I wasn't ever going to." Except, wait. Tsuna wrinkles his nose at the way that his side _still hurts_. "But-- but you bit me anyway!"

Hibari considers this. He has to _consider this_ , what was there even to consider? He says, "A mistake," which flatlines Tsuna's brain in a way that having to wake up to bodies had not. (It's no wonder that the doctors can look so concerned for him, really.) While Tsuna tries to decide how to feel about that, Hibari corrects himself, "No, a test."

Of what? A test of _what_? Tsuna wants to ask, he does _not_ want to ask. _Don't ask_ , something cautions him. There's no point in asking, even less point in knowing. ( _Don't ask._ ) Hibari isn't someone that Tsuna is meant to understand. Not yet.

Tsuna falls back into the grass with a tired moan.

*

And so it continues, with the second and third time passing them by without fanfare. Not any different from the first, save for the part where Tsuna gets bitten in that he-- doesn't. For some reason, Hibari doesn't bite him. It's very, very strange. And scary, in a way.

The fourth time though, the fourth time happens a week and a half later, after he's pulled himself back together from the effects of a peculiar doctor's appointment, more or less. Two days of hiding under his blanket (like he used to) makes everything feel new all over again.

"Can you tell me what day it is today, Tsuna?"

Since the incident with the spleen, since the eraser fire, since Nagi had said, _I'll see you soon_ , time had gone a little fuzzy around the edges. When he sleeps, the hours aren't so much lost as they're given up, relinquished. There's an element of choice to sleep that this fuzziness doesn't have, where the hours feel taken, stolen. Polluted. It feels very much like the first time that he'd met Hibari. Like when he'd stood outside in his backyard. When a man had burned. The one time that he thinks that he must've burned to the point of feeling satiated, but had made the world all that much emptier of people for it.

Or maybe that's all just a dream too, and Tsuna's just having a little trouble waking up, in recognizing them as dreams.

"Tsuna?"

"Um. Tuesday?" Tsuna says. Yesterday had been Sunday (with, admittedly, the faint aftertaste of Monday), but he only sees the doctors on his Tuesdays, so today-- has to be a Tuesday. He'd lost the rest of his Monday somewhere in between. He must've gone to school, though, because he remembers coming home. He remembers his mom saying, _thank you for coming home_.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And so the fourth time must happen on what has to be a Friday, lunchtime on a Friday. He's waiting for his turn at the vending machine when he blinks and rubs his eyes free of its crusts. It can take a little longer than two days, Tsuna knows, to try to shake off the way that the doctors would sometimes ask him to _close your eyes, Tsuna, and let me tell you a story, that's it_ , and how his mind would feel so heavy under their instructions. Like having to swim in mud, for as long as the doctor wants to comb their fingers through his thoughts.

_What happened at the park, Tsuna?_

It's still Friday when it becomes Tsuna's turn, probably only seconds away from the last time that he'd blinked. It feels longer. He's just pushed his money into the machine when someone shoulders him aside, because that's just how Fridays go, sometimes. That's how all days can go.

There's not much to be done about it though. Tsuna sighs and had just picked himself up and onto a nearby bench when the first body goes sailing past his shoulder and into the bushes behind him. When the second one comes skidding to a halt at his feet, Tsuna blinks.

Tsuna blinks, and his mind feels clear for the first time this week. Even the cobwebs cast by the doctors' ministrations flee from the callous gaze of Hibari Kyouya, leaving Tsuna to stare in shock, surprise, dread. His mouth might even flop open and closed for, who knows, three times? It's hard to tell.

Hibari stares back, a dark cloud of agitated energy. It's the type of gaze that hurts, a gaze that feels like the bite of a hundred needles.

Tsuna holds still and tries not to look like he's hiding something, which he isn't. He isn't, but sometimes the doctors seem to think that he is, and he doesn't think that Hibari would let that slide with just mild disappointment. _His_ disappointment would be a lot more painful, for one.

He holds still until he can't help but twitch, but by then, Hibari is nodding, one sharp incline of his head.

"Good," Hibari says. Grumbles, really, which is-- odd of Tsuna to think in relation to Hibari, even weirder than the uttered word, but that's what he feels to be true, and the last time that such feelings had been ignored, he'd--

Hibari slams the vending machine with a tonfa.

Oh no. _No._ "Hibari-san!" Tsuna yelps, leaping to his feet. He almost breaks his neck while tripping over the body lying at his feet, while stumbling close to where Hibari and the vending machine are about to go to war. He doesn't expect the vending machine to win, and Tsuna is _invested_ in this machine, okay, because it's the only one that carries a particular brand of melon milk that reminds him of the hospital where he'd relearned his mom. Where he'd started believing that it was possible to wake up from a nightmare.

The machine spits out two drinks when Tsuna presses the button. He picks them both up while Hibari is watches him like the hawk that he is _not_ , and rolls them back and forth.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Then, before his common sense could deter him into doing something less foolish, Tsuna shoves one of them at Hibari's chest. Doesn't look up as he says, "I'm not saying thank you! But, um, but-- uh, two is too much for me, so."

"I drink strawberry," Hibari says, but he doesn't let the melon milk fall when Tsuna draws back, so that's something. Better than nothing.

Though, actually. _Strawberry?_

"Melon is better," Tsuna says on reflex.

Hibari scowls.

"Er, to me! To me, at least," Tsuna says quickly. "Everyone's a little different, um. My mom likes banana best? And, Na--" _Nagi likes strawberry milk too_ , which Tsuna isn't going to say. He's not going to talk about Nagi and the sting of having to miss her and her easy affections. "Na--mi…mori… has all three? So they're probably all very good, so it's okay to like strawberry. Very much okay. But I still can't drink both, so I hope--"

Hibari's staring at him again. Staring like one would stare at a tiny animal doing silly, tiny animal things. That, or as if he's staring at a train wreck. Either, _both_ , would be kind of true.

"I hope you'll at least try it," Tsuna mumbles, and scurries off while his head is allowed to remain attached.

*

The fifth time that Tsuna blinks awake to the sight of bodies, he almost chokes on the taste of debris and bile on his tongue.

He's sick with panic for the moment that it takes him to register that these bodies are still breathing, though with varying degrees of pain, shame, and misery. There's a lingering recollection of being cornered and the usual song and dance that comes with it, but he doesn't-- he can't remember what might have happened to have led the _then_ into _now_. The memories are too vague and distant, as though Tsuna is borrowing them from someone else. As if they'd been formed while Tsuna had stepped out of his own body. Watching them feels a lot like trying to watch a movie with fuzzy, damaged pictures.

It's disorienting, but then, losing hours of memory is nothing new by now. He's come out of this more or less intact, like always. The last one still standing, over and over.

He sits upright to the sight of Hibari Kyouya and the ease with which he stands among the bodies, with the grace and birthright of a conqueror. And when Hibari turns to look back at him, he seems to look straight at Tsuna, at the fire that rests in Tsuna's chest. Improbable as the thought may be, Tsuna finds himself pressing a hand over it regardless, hiding it.

There are parts of him that have no business in aching when Tsuna tests a few of his limbs, and tomorrow, Tsuna will find bruises that he doesn't remember getting. But that'll be an issue for tomorrow, not today, because today, Tsuna has to wince and rub at the welts on his arms that are starting to throb like something fierce and feral, like the imprints of teeth. Or a tonfa.

Which is. Okay? It's-- whatever, it's just whatever; it's just something that happens, sometimes, where Tsuna gets hurt without a hint as to the how's or why's. It's fine, though. Something in him tells him that everything is fine, everything _will be_ fine. He's fine.

_Forget about it, there's no need to know_ , it tells him. Forget all about it, Tsuna-fish.

"Hibari-san?" Tsuna croaks, tired.

Hibari looks at him, gauging, appraising. "Have you come back to yourself, Sawada Tsunayoshi?"

Such a funny question to ask. Tsuna looks to the bodies so that he doesn't have to look at Hibari, choosing to look at the way that they groan and squirm instead. This is far from the first time that he's come awake like this, but even with that in mind, it's impossible not to notice how he feels unusually calm today. Calm, or too tired to panic as his sanity demands.

It's odd. This isn't right. Something about this isn't right.

Looking back down at his hands, Tsuna closes them together and threads his fingers together. Squeezes. (All five, all accounted for.)

"I'm here," Tsuna ends up saying, just like how he'd once told his mom, _I'm here, I was just dreaming._ It's an uncomfortable parallel to draw. If Hibari smiled as much as his mom, it'd be _absolutely terrifying_ , and Hibari would likely choose to swallow chalk before he'd touch Tsuna's hair and ask _are you still there_ like she had. Only--

Only he had, hadn't he? Sort of, he'd asked.

While Tsuna is processing the impossibility of that possibility, Hibari snorts and wanders off, bored.

Tsuna doesn't stop him. He doesn't stop him to ask him why. (Why him, why this, why spare him? Why is it that he's allowed to stand unharmed amongst the remains of the room that he'd set aflame, alive when a man is dead, _here_ when Nagi is not?) He doesn't ask why because it's not fair to expect Hibari to answer what Tsuna doesn't actually want to know, what he might've forgotten.

Some things aren't meant be known. Some things should be left alone to run its course, just like the red that recedes from the brown of his eyes when Tsuna looks in the mirror to wash his face.

*

"Hibari-san," Tsuna says in the aftermath of the sixth, seventh, umpteenth time, "Why do you hate crowding so much?"

Hibari pauses in the supremely disturbing task of rubbing his tonfa clean of blood. With the victim's own shirt, no less. But then, Tsuna can see how a graphic-tee might be free game for Hibari's use, being outside of regulation and all that. Case in point: he doesn't vandalize the uniform jacket at all. Doesn't even touch it, except to push it aside.

In hindsight, Tsuna probably could've chosen a better time to ask. A better time to speak at all, actually, considering the focus with which Hibari is trying to meet his (self-imposed) obligations to Namimori Elementary. He stares at Tsuna like he can't quite comprehend why Tsuna is there at all, which isn't _fair_ , because it'd only been thirty minutes since Hibari had woken him up just to tell him to _follow, but don't crowd_. It's been stressful, trying to maintain a four-step distance between them at all times.

Well. It's only three and a half right now. Tsuna should probably fix that.

It's not until another two boys are brought to heel from whatever nefarious rule-breaking behaviour that Hibari seems to have made a decision regarding the question, around the time that Tsuna had given up in getting an answer. He'd been sitting crouched some distance away at the time, sipping at his melon milk and wondering about the state of his life, when Hibari says, "Crowding create herds."

Tsuna slowly lowers his drink.

Hibari isn't looking at him, but his face is angled in such a way that Tsuna can still see the way that Hibari's lips are curled up, baring his canines. "Herds make the herbivores complacent. They become expectant to losing, and I refuse to be bound by such expectations."

No one in Namimori Elementary is dumb enough to include Hibari Kyouya as part of a herd, much less _their_ herd. No one but Tsuna is foolish enough to risk pain and misery by entertaining Hibari's presence on a semi-regular basis. But even _that_ hadn't been Tsuna's choice to do so, not at first. No one knows that better than him, and that it's only by Hibari's allowance that this parody of an association will continue at all.

That is to say, that answer made absolutely _no sense_.

It's tempting, isn't it, to dismiss Hibari's words as ones spoken out of arrogance, a quirk of someone different, someone dangerous. Arrogant and imposing and unlike the other snippets of personality that Tsuna had come to see and learn. It's too shallow of an explanation for the untold gravity of Hibari's answer. It's disrespectful.

Tsuna chews on his straw.

He feels a sudden rush of sympathy for the doctors. This is how they must feel, to be allowed to see the surface something so much greater, deeper than people are designed to comprehend. Things so incredibly difficult to understand that make people curious to try in spite of it, _because_ of it. There's only so much extrapolation that someone can do with one question though, and Hibari probably wouldn't allow for another one. Not today.

Maybe, Tsuna tells himself, maybe it's one of those things that cannot be understood. Maybe only Hibari Kyouya can understand Hibari Kyouya, just as only Tsuna could understand the whispers of fire.

"Hibari-san," Tsuna says, then stops.

_I don't understand_. He doesn't say that, nor does he apologize; he shouldn't _have_ to say _sorry, I don't understand you._ It's not like they're friends, just a pair of misfit creatures tricked into occupying the same space. There's no pressure for Tsuna to understand Hibari at all. (But he wants to. He wants to, even if he has no idea _why_.)

Hibari snorts and turns away. "Go to class, Sawada Tsunayoshi."

He was told to go. He should go. Tsuna bites his lower lip and doesn't move.

" _Go to class_ ," Hibari snarls again after a moment. _Go away._

Next time. Tsuna can maybe try his hand at understanding next time. Next time, when Hibari will likely still have all of his fangs bared, claws unsheathed, ready to scrape someone down to the bone. Tsuna looks forward to it with the same level of enthusiasm as getting a tooth pulled, the dread that comes with having to face something inescapable and absolute.

It's fine, though. He's used to it. It won't be unlike waiting for his nightmare to become a prophecy, wherein Tsuna will become so much more than just another faceless member of the herds that Hibari is trying so fiercely to disperse and protect, all at the same time.

*

Next time doesn't come. The times get awkward instead, awkward beyond the awkwardness that being acquainted with a predator as a prey animal can get, anyway.

This manifests into a slew of days where Tsuna's is the only body strewn across the ground without a hide or hair of Hibari to be seen. The extent of Hibari's presence becomes felt only through the intensity of his attention and how it pricks at Tsuna's skin, how it sets off his hair to be even messier than it already is.

It makes his days more peaceful, in a sense, but also-- tedious, kind of. The days (re)fill with people with whom Tsuna doesn't dare initiate eye contact or any significant contact at all, lest they become consumed by the fire that never truly leaves his thoughts. He goes back to sleeping more often than he breathes.

Tsuna finds himself missing the days where he can break free of his own monotony, moaning and complaining about the bodies that Hibari leaves behind him, behind _them_. Like breadcrumbs, he'd once muttered. Hibari had merely ignored him as he usually opts to do, except for when he doesn't. When he doesn't, he'd smirk and say something that leaves Tsuna wishing that he hadn't spoken at all.

Which probably speaks volumes about the him of today who wants nothing more than having that back, all of that back, sooner rather than later.

It's an uncomfortable realization to come awake to. It's not like Hibari is Nagi. He could never be her. He can't imagine telling Hibari all that he's told Nagi, nor can he imagine treating Nagi with the sams push and pull that he treats Hibari. He'd be too scared to lose her, whereas Hibari would sooner rip out Tsuna's throat than to bend to Tsuna's will in any form.

But that's what makes him _safe_. That's what makes him a unique existence in a world full of vulnerable people that Tsuna can find consistency and hold onto without worry. As much as Hibari would allow Tsuna to, anyway.

This feeling isn't new; he hasn't wanted to let Nagi go either, not since she'd sat outside of his small room made of blocks. It's Nagi and Hibari's only similarity, and it's a weak one, at that. It doesn't help him to understand anything.

Tsuna sighs and picks himself off of the ground. Pats himself dry of dust.

Well, there's nothing to be done about the distance or the awkwardness. His duty ( _duty?_ ) to Hibari is to simply exist, to be the axis on which Hibari could circle and approach by his own free will, just as he is the existence that Nagi could believe to be eternal.

Just wait, something instructs. Wait, and do your duty.

It's been a while since anything's actually made any sort of sense, so Tsuna finds no difficulty in ignoring the senseless nature of the advice to do as he's asked, to wait.

*

Same stuff, different day. Or something. It's a saying that Tsuna's heard on TV once, by someone who made his mom _tsk_ in disapproval before changing the channel. He doesn't mean to like the words as much as he does.

Same stuff, different day. Tsuna appreciates predictability. Appreciates the inherent safety of it, how it never leaves him to stare into the abyss through rusted metal bars while wondering, _is it my turn today?_

Tsuna kneels to collect the pieces of his melon bread, crushed clean under the feet of-- whoever. He can hardly be tasked to tell apart the ones that pull at his nonexistent pigtails, not when they flaunt and saunter in exactly the same way (same stuff, different day). He flinches from them for reasons unrelated to fear; there are worse things than being spat on, but few things are as bothersome. They're just time-consuming, eating into time that he could be spending on something else. Like sleep.

But it's okay. It's okay, because theirs was a torment that always ends. As long as it _ends_ , Tsuna doesn't mind. They don't change anything.

Tsuna is carrying the broken remains of his lunch (snack, really) to the trash when Hibari Kyouya says from his left, "Sawada Tsunayoshi," and Tsuna nearly strokes on the spot.

"Hibari-sa--" is all that Tsuna manages to say before he's stumbling and (nearly) tripping over the flat, sturdy surface of the school grounds. Hibari somehow manages to look both stone-faced and judgmental throughout it all.

Still, the tripping isn't what becomes the problem. It's how Tsuna trips and loses the pieces of his melon bread that he'd _just picked up_ , releasing them as patterns of confetti into the air, and the thought to leave these fallen pieces to be devoured by the birds is almost crushing in its appeal. But Tsuna's trash is still Tsuna's responsibility, even at home; it's one of the few chores that his mom will still allow Tsuna to do. (A clean home, Tsu-kun, makes for clean minds.) Plus, Hibari.

Tsuna is no stranger to pain, but he also makes no habit in seeking it. Tries to avoid it when possible, in fact. And the best way to do that, right now, is to pick up his trash.

"Do I have to?" Tsuna tries anyway after they share a moment of simply looking at the bread pieces.

"Oh? Would you prefer to eat them?" Hibari asks, all teeth.

Tsuna grimaces and gets to work.

And then, silence. It's a little terrible, but when Tsuna looks up, Hibari is still there, still standing there as if in vigil. It's not unlike how he'd looked during the very first time, when he'd stood over Tsuna while the fire had been whispering sweet nothings in Tsuna's ears, the way that Tsuna's body had felt so light. The way that he hadn't been able to let go of the dance of colours, of the orange and yellow and _red_ (like flames) until he'd been made to. Hibari had still been there then too, despite all that.

"Bread and eggrolls," Hibari says in a moment of startling synchronicity, "What's the difference?"

Hibari doesn't mean to speak about the foods themselves, probably. The incident with the upperclassman's bruised spleen is much more probable, and, well. Tsuna owes Hibari a question, doesn't he, after the way in which Hibari had answered a question that should have been innocuous.

So Tsuna says, "The eggrolls were my mom's. They-- they took that." Took them, like the hands that had used to take away the meals that they, themselves, had pushed through the bars because _time's up_ , today is your day to drown. He shakes off the thoughts. "The bread isn't-- um, it's just bread? It came from the school store."

"Sentimentality," Hibari summarizes, annoyed.

Tsuna dares a smile at Hibari's tone, weak and fleeting. "I guess? But my mom, she's--"

The reason that he's still here. The reason that makes it worth being _here_ as the world it is now, because Tsuna treasures this world as a proxy of her great love for it.

"I wouldn't want to be here without her," Tsuna ends up saying.

Hibari narrows his eyes, but says nothing else. Doesn't snort, doesn't ridicule, doesn't question any further when it must be tempting to do so. When it would be so _easy_. Tsuna is almost surprised that Hibari doesn't. He's entirely unsurprised that Hibari doesn't. It's an interesting feeling. Tsuna looks away first.

Tsuna looks away, and blurts out the first thing that comes to mind that might break this silence between them: "Hibari-san, please come buy another melon bread with me!" and tries not to cower too visibly when Hibari's expression goes from thoughtful to enraged in half a second. Pissed off because he's confused, furious because he can't comprehend the idiocy that he'd just heard. Fair enough; Tsuna doesn't quite understand what he'd just said either.

"Uh," Tsuna says, staring back. His jaw isn't working quite right, he's finding. Because that's not quite what he'd meant to say, but, well. Spilt milk, Tsu-kun. Not much else you can do but to clean it up.

"Melon bread goes _really well_ with strawberry milk?" Tsuna wheedles.

Hibari looks at him as if to say _liar_ , which Tsuna sort of is, because he has no idea about strawberry milk. At all. He'd never be as foul as to betray his melon milk for strawberry.

Still, it's _a_ reason, isn't it? And any reason is reason enough for something as ridiculous as trying to go lunch-shopping with Hibari Kyouya. It'll at least give Hibari reason to smack Tsuna over the head with a tonfa, which would be fine. It'd be totally fine, considering how vastly preferably pain would be in comparison to this type of embarrassment. Tsuna might have to stop himself from saying _thank you_ , even.

It's not a good enough reason that Hibari should _accept_ , though. Not enough for Hibari to say _sure, fine, whatever_ in his Hibari-esque way. He should have said _I will bite you to death_ , and do just that, not-- not come along when Tsuna had decided to go either way, with or without him. They shouldn't both be here, lining up together for _melon bread_ of all things, because immediately what happens is that Hibari loses his mind.

"For crowding, _I will bite you all to death_ ," Hibari snarls, looking a little manic around the eyes at the sheer chaos that is the lunch rush crowd.

People go screaming. Of course they do, it's _Hibari Kyouya_. It's Hibari Kyouya on a mission.

On the plus side, it cuts down the line by, like, everyone. Everyone but Tsuna. Everyone else is too busy getting mowed down, too busy groaning in pain on the ground. Tsuna steps over them carefully, meeting the lunch lady with a queasy smile as he places his order for two. Tsuna tries to smile because his mom always smiles to make him feel better, and the lunch lady looks like she might need a little bit of his mom's magic. It's a good idea, except for how him smiling doesn't appease her horror at all; it-- it actually seems to make it worse?

Well, Tsuna has always known his mom was unique. He shouldn't have tried to pretend that he could be her, really.

When he turns around, it's to the familiar sight of bodies on the ground and Hibari standing betwixt them as wrath incarnate. Hibari and Tsuna, the only two to remain standing, as per the new established norm, and this is-- this isn't so bad. This is better, miles better, than being the only one left standing. He no longer minds it as much as he probably should, as he's used to mind, more or less distracted by having to come around to where he won't be approaching Hibari from his blind spot.

And Hibari, he lets him. Bloodlust banked as a simmering promise, head cocked, he lets the fire within Tsuna that he must be able to feel come close, wearing only blood and bruises on his tonfas as his line of defence. And Tsuna--

Tsuna stops three and a half steps away to wait. He breathes in the smell of ashes and smoke as the fire waits for Hibari to circle back around, to perch and maybe stay.


	3. Hibari Kyouya, II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was a struggle, but it's finally become something worth sharing, hopefully.
> 
> i would highly encourage rereading hibari's parts from the previous chapter due to a) a few edits, mostly word choices, b) for the build-up, since hibari's chapters are meant to be read as a cohesive whole. except these chapters are long enough as they are, hence why they're broken up, haha......

"You know, Hibari-san," Tsuna says, wheezes out, "This would go much faster if you helped."

Hibari's still resting against the wall when Tsuna looks over, a melon bread in one hand and a carton of strawberry milk in the other. His tonfas are hanging from his belt, resting against his thighs. Only a short reach away and probably still dirty from the way that they'd squeezed the snot out of the people that Tsuna is now trying to move, though with slow progress. Hibari's still there, but he says nothing, meeting Tsuna's complaints with nothing but silence.

It's a little weird, that silence, even if it's much better than the baleful stares that Tsuna had used to get. Still, he'd been expecting at _least_ a grunt, considering the lighter tone of Hibari's responses as of late, ones that would hint at something other than Hibari's usual brand of irritation or impatience. It'd been especially pronounced after Tsuna had caught onto how receptive Hibari _can_ be, even to complaints when there was no whining attached. To when Tsuna spoke without a stutter dogging every syllable of his words.

It's like he's intrigued, almost. Curious about the ways in which Tsuna's been learning to push back, to test the boundaries set between them.

Tsuna's been trying with Hibari Kyouya, is what he's saying. Though sometimes, it doesn't seem to amount to much. Nothing beyond the liberty to talk back without getting a tonfa shoved up his gut. Which still happens, of course it does, but no more than once every ten missteps.

"What," Hibari says at last, "are you doing?"

Tsuna huffs. Quietly so that he can't be so easily overheard, but he does it. He huffs.

The last time Tsuna that had left victims of Hibari's brand of discipline unconscious under the summer sun, one of them had ended up in a hospital. From _heatstroke_. And stress. Oh, and terror. A heatstroke caused by terror. Which hadn't even been the worst of it all, because the worst had followed shortly thereafter, with how the school had tried to reprimand Hibari Kyouya.

Namimori Elementary had tried to _reprimand_ Hibari Kyouya. Had tried to reprimand _Hibari Kyouya_. It'd been kind of awful, and it's honestly better for everyone that Tsuna had since then taken it upon himself to pull people under the shade of a tree, a building, a _garbage can_ , in hopes of warding off a repeat performance.

It's a thankless job, one that sometimes even feels futile and never-ending. Still, the physical labour aside, at least it's not too difficult; Tsuna finds that people don't tend to be too picky about their sleeping spot, post-knockout. It also helps that Hibari will sometimes decide to stick around for it as he's doing now, watching Tsuna's struggles from where he's perched, three steps away. (Circling in ever closer.)

The third and final body is on its way into the shade when Hibari speaks again, "Enough, Sawada Tsunayoshi."

Tsuna freezes at the tone, and takes more than a few seconds to feel relaxed enough to glance back. "Hibari-san?"

Hibari has an odd look on his face. Odd, as in, pinched. Worried, maybe? --No, definitely not. That'd just be silly, and there isn't anything here worth worrying about. Tsuna's just moving Hibari's mess where it can't get anyone in trouble. It's not a reason to make Hibari look like that, dark and frustrated. _Wary_.

"Er. Hibari-san?"

"It won't fit," Hibari says.

It? "He," Tsuna corrects on habit, but-- it's true. The third person wouldn't fit. The shade won't be enough to fit them, at least half of them. There's too much junk around, like garbage bags, garbage cans, discarded furniture. All squeezed into the space that stands between two walls, two buildings.

Tsuna bites his lip. Could someone get heatstroke from having their legs and feet uncovered for a long time?

"It's also awake," Hibari says.

As if on cue, eyes flutter open, drowsy with pain but no less deep with fury. Still a little unfocused, but consciousness is starting to gain traction, so.

Tsuna lowers the arm slowly, with more care than his insistent yanking must have felt. But Tsuna hadn't had much choice, not when trying to move someone so much taller, bigger. He puts the arm down and backs away by a step.

Hibari snorts like another person might sigh, put upon and testy, while pushing himself upright. He takes a step forward, then another half-step before shoving his carton of strawberry milk into Tsuna's hands with a dire look of warning. "I do not plan on sharing."

Well, no, of course not. Tsuna would never drink Hibari Kyouya's milk, it's _Hibari Kyouya's._ Also, strawberry was-- no. Tsuna didn't drink strawberry.

Tsuna holds onto the milk with both hands as he's swept aside by the force of Hibari stepping up. Like how some of his classmates might step up to their turn at baseball, though with a tonfa than a wooden bat.

Hibari studies the rousing person with distant, muted interest before he tilts his head at Tsuna. He's saying something now, speaking words that Tsuna should take heed. But Hibari has also yet to drop his snack from his other hand, and it's quite an image, seeing Hibari Kyouya with his trademark weapon in one hand and a half-eaten melon bread in the other. Tsuna might've even smiled at it had it not been for that _CRACK_ of a sound that resounds as the world's worst alarm clock, and Tsuna--

Tsuna wakes up.

*

Tsuna wakes up and Tsuna is in his room. He's in his room, staring up at the familiar pattern of his ceiling, on his bed.

Tsuna wakes up, he woke up, and now he's in his room. He sees only darkness for as long as it takes him to realize that he's under his covers, that his duvet had crawled up and over the whole of him sometime through the night. Tsuna throws them off with a relish, and the next breath feels good, fresh.

Tsuna wakes up. He rolls over to blink at the sight of a half-empty carton of strawberry milk sitting on his night table. It's warm when he picks it up. Sweet when he takes an experimental sip.

Warm, real, and very, very sweet. Tsuna doesn't spit it out, but it's a near thing.

*

He puts the milk in the fridge. His mom even lets him keep it in the fridge for two whole days before she asks him about it, smiling through her confusion.

"I'm keeping it for someone," Tsuna says in explanation.

His mom gets him a black drawing marker so that he can put a name on it, to make sure no one accidentally drinks Tsu-kun's friend's milk. Which, if Tsuna hadn't been so thrown at the very idea of drinking _Hibari Kyouya's milk_ (and isn't _that_ a thought that hits him like a dodgeball to the face, sudden and fleeting), he may have been faster in correcting her error. That they're not _friends_ , Hibari and he, because Hibari would never stand to be called such a thing.

"Someone like Nagi-chan then?" his mom asks. Her voice is light, but there's a heaviness to her question that makes Tsuna tense and twist his fingers into the hem of his shirt.

"I don't know," Tsuna mumbles. Because that's what he wants, maybe; that's what the fire wants, definitely. But that's not his choice. It's never been his choice, because it's always meant to be Hibari's, Hibari's choice to stay or leave. All that Tsuna's allowed is to be a constant throughout it all, unchanging in what he is, absolute like the tides of the sea.

He doesn't think that he can explain all that to his mom, though. He barely understands it himself.

Tsuna ends up drawing a bird that looks more like a chicken when he'd meant to write _Hibari-san_ on the side of the milk carton. He spends a moment to stare down at it in horror, because he can't-- there's no way that he can give it back like _this_. Not if Tsuna wanted to keep his head. He'd be better off buying a whole new carton of milk in offering, but if Tsuna could claim to know Hibari Kyouya by now, even a little bit, then he knows, _knows,_ that Hibari wouldn't settle for anything but the original, the one that he, himself, had picked out.

Tsuna grimaces.

Well. That left him with just the one option, didn't it?

*

Avoiding Hibari Kyouya was easier when Hibari Kyouya wants to be avoided, Tsuna finds. He does his best by not meeting Hibari's eyes instead.

Tsuna's gotten used to the classes by the time that he realizes that Hibari isn't asking for his milk back, that the milk is doing nothing but collecting dust in his fridge. With the chicken still scribbled on it. (He'd begged his mom to keep it. To not throw away this strange, new thing that Hibari had entrusted him with. Not the milk itself, but whatever it is that had trumped Hibari's possessive instincts to let Tsuna keep it.) But even the very thought of his sin against Hibari Kyouya's drink makes him scurry away. To look away faster even when Hibari says, _Sawada Tsunayoshi_ in the kind of tone that Tsuna _knows_ that Hibari will use when he wants to be obeyed.

Still, his Hibari Kyouya hiccups aside, the world is actually pretty normal when he opens his eyes for the days that take place after his not-dream.

If he ignores the milk-that-shall-not-be-mentioned, Tsuna finds himself appreciating the calm, soothing days where there's nothing but birdsong and wind in his hair. How the space beneath his back will be warm and sleepy with his weight when he wakes up. How Tsuna's memory of the day might even be fully intact, when there isn't even a hint or flash of the nightmare to bleed into his thoughts. (How the fire feels minutely soothed, as if it'd been given a chance to burn, and Tsuna's _not thinking about that._ )

Tsuna even grows to appreciate his classes, the way that they cycle onward with the same kind of inevitable certainty as the rise and fall of dawn. There are no surprises to the classes themselves (class _mates_ are different; class _mates_ are a whole other story), with their set time pockets, their set duration of forty-five minutes, their set subjects. They even begin to give him the same type of comfort that Tsuna can only find in his dreams, and that's new. New, but good, in that he doesn't need to close his eyes to feel centered and calm, to resist the world that keeps trying to shake him apart.

The renewed focus in class has consequences too, ones that make themselves apparent in short order. It helps him rediscover numbers and their patterns, their equations. He learns to appreciate the difference between the vowels and the consonants. History becomes a favourite in its consistency, in how it is inherently free of surprise. He even begins to raise his head when the teachers call his name.

The first time that Tsuna ever brings home a smiley-face sticker on a test, his mom is so ecstatic that she ends up over-ordering takeout sushi from the local sushi shop. They walk around the neighbourhood to share their leftovers while collecting chuckles and smiles as rewards for their quest. There's even enough to tuck away a few pieces in a tupperware to be shoved into the hands of a blank-faced, nonplussed Hibari Kyouya. (Just the tuna, though. Tsuna keeps the shrimp for himself, but Hibari dumps the empty container over Tsuna's head the very next day, so he figures that the tuna hadn't been _that_ bad of a choice to share.)

His mom looks down to smile at him at the end of it all, squeezing his hand, and it's nice. It's just-- really nice that Tsuna has _earned_ this smile, finally bringing her joy instead of sadness as her son ought to.

*

It's on the tailcoats of such success that summer goes into full swing, alongside which is the onset of the final exams.

The energy that which grips his classmates is nothing like what Tsuna has experienced before, the way that it turns the school into a powder keg of nervous energy. Tsuna, meanwhile, looks upon the exams with the same measure of feeling that he meets everything else: that is, not much at all. He wants them to be over, sure, but for no other reason than to bump his days back on a schedule that he knows and can thus appreciate.

It's not like Tsuna can't understand the stress. He can even comprehend the reasons behind it: final exams denote the end of the school term, and while that's always worth looking forward to, final exams are still the _final exams_. There's a certain level of expectation to them. The students are expected to do well, _just do the best as you can, Tsuna-kun_ , just as they are expected to feel shame if they don't.

And it's _that_ , that necessity for shame, that Tsuna can't understand.

Shame for what? For disappointing his teachers, his school? Why would he feel the need to be embarrassed? Tsuna has grown to care for his teachers as much as he cares for his classmates, in that while he doesn't want them to burn, he views them with little fondness. He doesn't wish them death, but he wouldn't want fish or grass or earthworms to die either, so. Disappointing them might make him uncomfortable for a little while, but it wouldn't hurt him.

Disappointing his mom, now. _That_ would hurt, but his mom and the doctors had both talked to him about that last week. They'd sat, cramped together in a small office, so that they could tell him how they'd be proud of whatever that he can manage. Because _Tsu-kun is my brave little caterpillar_. Because _Tsuna, you finished a full term of school_ , and that's something to be proud of in and of itself.

Tsuna doesn't think so, doesn't agree _at all_ , but he's not going to look too far past their gift. And it _is_ a gift; a lack of expectation is a good thing, because without expectations, there can be no failure. And if he can't fail, he can't be hurt. There will be no one to hold his head underwater if he fails what they want of him, no hands at his throat.

He'd tried to explain that to Nagi once. He'd tried to tell her about the dangers of being the recipient of expectations, had tried to tell her through a jumble of feelings and words. And, well, she seemed to get it, so it probably makes sense in some kind of way.

Their gift turns out for naught when the final exams never quite ripens into the Big Deal that everyone had worried that it'd become. Turns out, Tsuna does well enough that his second term won't suffer with remedial classes. His grades aren't anything worth celebrating, but the return to normalcy _is_ , so Tsuna gets himself melon milk when the exam results are announced. He even accepts his mom's hugs and kisses to the forehead without much protest, glowing under her words of congratulations to the point that, well--

"Stop that," Hibari tells him, the next day. His voice is deceptively mild, almost pleasant, but Tsuna's since learned to grow instinctively wary of that tone of voice.

"I'm not doing anything," Tsuna mumbles. He puts a hand over his smile anyway.

Hibari snorts.

Turns out, Hibari had been the only one to take to the news with his usual brand of dismissal, a wave of the hand. He doesn't seem surprised at Tsuna's (minor) success at all, not at all compliant with the wonder that it invokes in everyone else. It's-- weird, kind of. Weird that Hibari might have had, maybe, more faith in Tsuna than even his mom.

It feels a little ridiculous, even as a passing thought. Maybe it's just a simple matter of having _no_ expectations. No expectations, no disappointments.

But then, birds of prey weren't meant to be terribly affectionate creatures. They showed their warmth in other ways, like-- like by not leaving. Like by flying back to where it's perceived to be needed. Like by not attacking when someone got too close. (Like killing for a purpose other than hunger or for territory, to make the air shudder with a _CRACK_ to wake someone up.) Tsuna had watched a TV program that had once said as much, and it's an easy claim to believe, considering.

So Tsuna's crusade to avoid Hibari Kyouya is still a work in progress, but after having had to throw away the strawberry milk after it'd gotten lumpy and smelly and Hibari had _still_ yet to ask for it back, Tsuna's starting to realize that it'll be okay, maybe. That Hibari had perhaps forgotten about what he's owed. Or that he'd forgiven Tsuna while Tsuna had been busy stressing over the inevitability of his fate, which is hopeful, wishful, and also: impossible. He'd forgotten. It could for no other reason.

It doesn't change how Tsuna's still having trouble meeting Hibari's eyes though, how his insides will twist itself into a churning ball of nerves whenever he does, on accident. Or how Hibari had since then seemed to have developed a terrible new habit of looking, purposefully, at Tsuna, to look at him for long periods at a time, like he expects to see something different every time that he lets Tsuna sit within his vicinity for lunch, or when he looks up after a period of beating rulebreakers and delinquents into the dirt. Like he's surprised to see that Tsuna is still there.

Hibari does this, even when it's always been Hibari who'd chosen the number of steps that lie between them. It'd been Hibari who'd chosen to shrink the three and half steps that lay between them into three, then two and a half, sometimes two. Almost within touching distance.

But, well. If Hibari hasn't noticed it, then Tsuna's not going to tell him.

*

There's something unfair about bunnies and their noses, the way that they wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. Something unfairly therapeutic.

Namimori Elementary was home to a small family of bunnies, living off the tiny patch of grassland that lay adjacent to the school. Now, these bunnies, they're of the clever sort, the progeny of a great ancestor bunny that knew better than to dismiss human children as squirmy, squealy pests. No, the teachers had said, it knew that people could be their friends, that we would feed them and love them if only they'd let us. So this great ancestor bunny had done just that, and its children has since brought joy and delight to many students by hopping close enough to be spoiled. It's only fair that Namimori Elementary should repay them for such delightful company.

It's a silly tale. It's even sillier when Tsuna learns that the story comes attached with a _chore_ , where one student is expected to go feed the bunnies on a designated day. One student, out of the entire school, one per day. Tsuna has no idea how he'd been chosen out of the bunny raffle when he'd been here for just _one term_ , when he hadn't even been able to stay awake for the name drawing had taken place sometime during this month, but looking at the bunnies now, he's having a little trouble feeling even a little bit upset.

They're-- well. They're, kind of? Sort of? Really cute? As in, really, _really_ cute. So cute that they're making Tsuna cringe, his own nose wrinkling in sympathy when they wiggle theirs. Pure little creatures, their heads full of nothing but food and warmth and safety, hopping about with careless abandon despite the big bad hawk that also stands among their numbers.

Tsuna stares. He has to.

He has to rub his eyes once, twice, eight and eight million times at the absurdity that is the image of Hibari Kyouya standing amongst a colony of bunnies, because that can only be Hibari who's turning his head to meet Tsuna's wide-eyed stare.

Tsuna feels a little uneven when he smiles, off-balance and frail, and he wonders at himself that chooses to shrug instead of running away as the better half of his thoughts want of him. When he shrugs and brings to attention the bucket of bunny food that sits by his feet instead of thinking about going anywhere but here, with this choice of company. When he chooses to stay here despite having tried avoiding Hibari for however long before.

Acceptance clears the danger off of Hibari's face, smoothes out his glower. With the vulnerable slant of his flank angled toward Tsuna, Hibari turns away and drops to a knee.

Extend a hand.

And immediately get swarmed by bunnies with rapidly wiggling noses.

One of these days, Tsuna will stop startling at the lethal wonder that is Hibari Kyouya. One day, he will see Hibari Kyouya get mobbed by-- by _birds_ or something, and he'll be able to brush it aside. He'll shrug it off. He'll be able to tell Nagi, _that's just Hibari-san being Hibari-san_. But that day will not be today, because that's still bunnies mobbing Hibari, not birds, and Nagi isn't here (she's still not here) for Tsuna to gloat at.

So it's more fitting that Tsuna should take to almost tripping over his bucket of vegetables with the force of his surprise, his attention shunted from his already precarious sense of balance to the scene before him. Specifically to Hibari Kyouya, buried within the wiggling mess of Namimori Elementary's bunny family.

Tsuna rubs his eyes one more time, just because. Just in case.

He also discovers a few things. Namely, that it takes some work to keep a hold of the bucket and walk forward at the same time. It takes him three times of almost falling on his face before he gets the hang of the art of waddling, taking great care as not to drop the bucket and its contents. After all, one shouldn't feed dirty vegetables to bunnies. That'd be rude. Best to take twice as long to cover the ten steps of distance than to cause a minor disaster. Hibari doesn't look like he's going anywhere, besides.

No, the problem comes from another source entirely, one that only becomes apparent when Tsuna draws in close.

Because when he does, the wiggling stops. The bunnies all freeze and look at him, at _him_ , not the carrot in his hand, their ears held tall and taut. They take a hop back for each step that he takes forward, and when Tsuna pauses and takes an experimental step to the side, their gazes follow. They look at him as if they can't make up their minds about him, doesn't know whether to run from him or love him. Whether he's as tame as the summer sky or only a leaf away from becoming a wildfire.

And Tsuna thinks, _oh no_.

This happens, sometimes. Not always, but sometimes, dogs will flatten themselves to the ground when he comes near, tails tucked close to their bodies. They won't bark, won't growl or bare their teeth, but they'll shy away when he tries to touch. Cats will wander away, as far as possible, without losing sight of him, tail swishing back and forth as he's grudgingly allowed to encroach on their territory. Fish will swim away, turtles will pop back into their shells, and Hibari--

Hibari reaches over to pluck the carrot out of Tsuna's hand, taking a step forward to offer it to the bunnies in his stead. And when that had been nibbled away into nothing, he reaches back for Tsuna to pass him a few leaves of lettuce, bok choy, eggplants, asparagus. He waits for Tsuna to fumble them out of the bucket instead of reaching into the bucket himself, and doesn't look at Tsuna once.

And it's not a bad thing that he doesn't, that he doesn't look. The smile that overtakes Tsuna's face is a tiny, helpless thing. It's the type of thing that Hibari probably wouldn't want to see, something that might or might not get Tsuna bitten to death, because it's always a toss-up, whether or not Hibari will bite him over things like these.

On some days, Hibari will snap at Tsuna's fingers if he gets too close, but leave just enough distance for Tsuna to pull away on time. On other days still, he would go straight for the jugular without a threat to spare. And on rarer days _still_ , he won't react at all. He'll let Tsuna do as Tsuna feels compelled to do, and do nothing but watch.

Considering the strange peace and sanctity of this moment with the bunnies, it's hard to tell what kind of day today will be. That, and today doesn't seem like a great day at all to test the waters, except--

Except, that's exactly the type of resolve that tends not to last the minute, with Tsuna forgetting about it almost right away in his need to say, "Thanks, Hibari-san."

Hibari gives him a sour look and smacks him in the face with a half-eaten piece of lettuce.

*

When Tsuna blinks, Tsuna first dreams of fire, of burning, dancing people. People who'd been crushed under the weight of their agony, the weight of the fire that Tsuna tries to keep tame inside his chest. It snarls and snaps back at those that come from the shadows to take him away. Seeking to take them _both_ away, him and Nagi, him and Hibari.

Hibari, whose sharp consonants had kept Tsuna from blazing out of control as Tsuna had done twice before already, surrounded by buildings of a city that neither of them can call home. How his tonfa had donned the blood of a man so that Tsuna wouldn't have to.

How Tsuna had once said _thank you_ , and all Hibari had asked of him was, _enough_ , so Tsuna had woken up.

When Tsuna blinks, he _remembers_ waking up. He remembers waking up in his room.

He remembers how he'd woken up in his room, on his bed, free to grab a hold of his duvet to yank it over his head. To build a wall around himself that is more lumpy and uneven than it is sturdy, made all the more perfect and comforting because of it. How these walls make it easier for Tsuna to breathe, within the only walls that he knows for certain that won't cage him in.

Tsuna remembers being awake and the weight of what feels like a dream that _can't_ be a dream ringing in his ears, because he only dreams about one thing, and Hibari isn't-- that. Hibari isn't _of_ that, not yet.

Tsuna can still remember it though, dream or not. He remembers hearing that _CRACK_ of a sound, the one that echoes like the school bell at the end of a long, long a day. A bell rung by a tonfa, a tonfa to the head. Head to the wall. A wall that then blooms with a pattern painted in a bright, sticky red. And in the background is a gurgle of a breath, an indistinguishable sound, perhaps a spoken word. Then, silence: blissful and catastrophic.

Blood and bone. Cinders and smoke. _Is he okay? He just-- stopped moving_.

_He's dead, Tsunayoshi-kun._

He's dead.

Tsuna remembers a tonfa. A tonfa to _Tsuna's_ head, one that isn't meant to hit him but to startle him backwards, back against the wall behind him, startling him out of the fuzzy bleed of colour into his sight. How the will of Hibari Kyouya had cauterized the hemorrhage of colours, delaying the yellow and orange and red from rebuilding Tsuna's world to make it bright and crisp. How Hibari had leaned in way too close for either of them to feel remotely comfortable, pinning Tsuna in place before he could fly apart. Keeping Tsuna together on behalf of his mom and Nagi, in a place far away from their reach.

Because the place of this dream, the setting of this not-dream, this memory, is not Namimori Elementary, or even the town of Namimori at all.

It's not even a school. It can't be, because it'd been a field trip. They'd been on a field trip. An annual trip into the nearby city to watch the traditional form of entertainment, someone had said, back when nobody had televisions or phones or even the same streets. When they definitely didn't have Tsuna or the fire that had raged and blazed when three people, _men_ , not upperclassmen, not children at all, had jumped out from the shadows to throw Tsuna aside and grab at Hibari. Like maybe how people had also once tried to take Nagi and Tsuna away, back at the park.

And like the park, Tsuna can remember little beyond the black terror of being taken, the horror that came with even just the thought of revisiting his small room. He remembers little beyond the world ending under his feet. Nothing beyond the memories of fire, nothing past having to breathe in ashes where screams should be.

_What happened at the park, Tsuna?_

When the shadow-men fall one by one like mountains, fingers had come around his jaw to curl in tight and steadfast. It'd been a grip that had bullied Tsuna back into awareness. It'd made him freeze for just the moment that it'd taken him to realize that the hands were not around his neck. That it's just Hibari, who might one day kill him, but will never hurt him how it counts.

The Hibari of his memory, of his dream, says something after that, maybe Tsuna's name. It's hard to be sure; Hibari sounds so far away, muffled by the roar in Tsuna's ears. He's saying words that Tsuna can't hear, can't understand. There isn't even a tonfa in his other hand, just an uneaten, unopened melon bread sitting by his feet and a carton of strawberry milk in his other hand, and--

_And?_

And nothing. That's it.

That's all there is, because Tsuna doesn't chase the memory when it fades. He doesn't _want_ to think about what Hibari might or might not have said, not now, not when Tsuna is awake enough to know what he wants, which is to think about nothing at all.

Tsuna wakes up, and then Tsuna falls back asleep, back into the dream that he knows. The fire that he knows. And when he wakes up, he remembers never looking past how he'd been missing pieces of his memory, so common as that is. He wakes up and just pulls back the covers to see the half-empty carton of strawberry milk sitting on his night table, and thinks nothing of it.

He suffers _weeks_ with an inexplicable discomfort in his gut whenever he sees Hibari. Wonders, for the same amount of time, at the way that Hibari had looked at Tsuna, as though he'd expected Tsuna to run and hide. To reject him for something that Tsuna couldn't remember to have been done.

Oh, he thinks. _Oh._

*

The sun feels heavier when Tsuna peels open his eyes (for the third time, the umpteenth time), heavy as the afternoon sunlight tends to be.

Tsuna doesn't wake up in his room, on his bed, or under the covers. When Tsuna wakes up for this umpteenth time, it's with the lazy thoughts of _what? where?_ rolling across his mind like the dustball that he'd once found under his bed. It couldn't have been that long of a nap, because he's not too sore despite having woken up on an overlay of dirt. It even feels as a nap should feel, so very unlike the fuzziness that eats up his days to leave him feeling hollow. This had just been sleep, simple and easy.

So Tsuna doses for another minute, drowsy and resistant to the very idea of being awake. He grumbles when movement catches his ears, when he feels the strange need to turn his head.

And when he does, he peels his eyes open to see Hibari. Hibari, bunnies, and an afternoon of an odd sort of peace that Tsuna knows not to trust.

Still, Tsuna knows, with a strange sense of surety, that the Hibari before him is the real one, the one that hails from the place and time that Tsuna's supposed to be. That this is the present, that this is real. Nowhere else could there be Hibari, sitting in meditative silence as he runs a hand down the length of a sleepy bunny on his lap. Tsuna's imagination wasn't anywhere _near_ that powerful.

A bunny whose nose is _still_ wiggling, despite how focused it seems at getting pampered, and, again: unfairly therapeutic. Steadying, too. Filling Tsuna with the courage and a hollow sort of confidence to sit up and remain where he is, a mere two steps away from Hibari. He draws strength from the way that Hibari remains utterly relaxed, almost serene. Tsuna sits up and draws his legs against his chest. He stretches out his hands so that he can count his fingers.

"Hibari-san," Tsuna says, slowly. Counting down. "I had this-- dream? About a field trip."

*

Summer is a season that can be quite capricious with rain, and that's something to be held true for this year too. The world outside is awash with the white noise of it when it'd been clear only an hour before, steady as heartbeat. A curtain finish to the end of another day.

Tsuna stands in the middle of the street, a few blocks east of where he's supposed to be, sheltered by the umbrella unfolded above his head.

He stands in the middle of the street, made unable to move forward by a feeling that tells him: this isn't where he's supposed to be. He should be somewhere else, somewhere other than here, somewhere that turns his body in the opposite direction. It sets him off into a run, and Tsuna can feel the rain kick back in response, the wind tunneling past his limbs.

Tsuna hangs onto the umbrella with the same degree of instinct that he hangs onto his mom, desperate and as if he were to die. He can feel it bend and break behind him, trying to drag him back. Trying to convince him otherwise, you don't need to go there. You don't need to see. There's no place for you here, a few paces away from where he can see Hibari and his shadow.

Hibari, who turns into the corner of a place that kids are warned not to go, a few blocks to the opposite end of the street from which Tsuna had come. Hibari, who's being escorted away by tall, rugged people. Some of them are in suits, others in jeans and ugly jackets and vests.

Tsuna makes to follow, throat tight with the syllables of Hibari's name. He makes all of three steps when he runs into a wall, a warm wall. A wall dressed in dark colours, one whose breath stinks with sour aggression and spoiled intentions.

A wall dressed in a black, black suit.

He freezes.

He freezes, and Tsuna can do little other than breathe faster and faster until it hits a panicked rhythm. Little other than go rigid and useless when a hand descends on his shoulder (instead of around his arms, around his neck), heavy and restraining. The fire rumbles just as Tsuna yelps, as he tries to flinch away from the way that those fingers squeeze him tight prior to jerking him along. He winces as he feels those bruises start to bloom and ache.

Everything hurts, _please_ , even when he should know better, when he should know that begging is not what will help you, Sawada Tsunayoshi. _We know what you can see._

It hurts by the time that he, too, is forced to turn into a place with a ground that crinkles under his feet, noisy with broken shards of glass and days-old cigarette butts.

It _hurts_ by the time that Tsuna is able to look up, to look up at the sight of Hibari Kyouya, looking no less dangerous despite how the people around him are so much taller, wider. How they tower around him like the borders of a guillotine, and how Hibari is _yawning_ , calm and collected, bored. Because of course.

But that's what ends up giving him away. His apathy makes it all the more easier to tell when, exactly, Hibari comes into full comprehension of Tsuna's presence. The significance of it, the danger inherent within it.

"Hey, boss," the hand around Tsuna's shoulder says, "Look at this mouse I found."

The gaze that Hibari turns to the hand on Tsuna's shoulder is one that Tsuna's never seen before, chilling and punishing with the sort of physical intensity that can push people back. And it does; it pushes Tsuna back into a flinch, and the hand on his shoulder digs in even tighter to shake him back into obedience. Tsuna bites down on his noises and hold his breath at the _sudden rush of fire, the desire to make them kiss the ground on which Tsuna stands. Because that's where they belong, these creatures of dirt and scum._

There is a sneer, a _snarl_ , at Hibari's lips when when Tsuna takes his next breath in, sharp as any spoken word.

"That is no mouse," Hibari says. There's something unhindered about the way he pulls himself free of the hand on his own shoulder. He makes it look so _easy_ , resisting those that try to take away his agency, makes it look like nothing less than his given right.

"A friend of yours, Hibari Kyouya-kun?" someone else asks with an odd emphasis on Hibari's last name, both sneering and respectful at once.

Hibari looks so offended at that that Tsuna almost giggles, halfway to hysterics. Well, almost. Because shortly after that, Hibari scoffs, "Don't be ridiculous. A King does not have friends," and Tsuna almost chokes on it, his laughter.

The men around them laugh enough in his stead though, mocking and jeering at the title that Hibari had so casually invoked, _you will be King_ , deaf to the way that Hibari bristles into place, carnage at the ready. Hibari looks at no one but Tsuna through the noise, unshakeable and doubtless, and Tsuna knows with just as much certainty that Hibari's next few words are meant for Tsuna. _Only_ Tsuna.

"But those that lay a hand on what's mine will be bitten to death."

*

Hibari dances when he fights.

Tsuna's never noticed it before, but then, he's never seen Hibari _fight_ anyone before, either. No one his size, no one in Namimori Elementary, is worth Hibari to go full-throttle. They'd all fallen at the first beat of the dance, and a one-step dance could surely be no longer called a dance but a chore. Just something to be done, no more than a duty.

But _this_ \-- this is nothing like that. This is something bloody and terrible and terribly fun, if the manic glint that Tsuna sees reflected in Hibari's face is anything to go by. As if he's flying high on the satisfaction of knocking down his challengers, bringing to heel those that dare to bare their teeth at his authority. Flying higher and higher with every grunt and scream that he draws out of them, from every bone that he breaks under his tonfas. Satisfaction, which would be nothing like what Tsuna _had felt,_ would feel, _when the first of them had been reduced to ash,_ if the fire were to do as it pleased.

Hibari isn't like Tsuna at all when he fights back, choreographed and beautiful, practiced, kind of like art. There's no sense of urgency, no desperation. No true savagery for all of his strength, and therein lies the problem, doesn't it, Sawada Tsunayoshi? Hibari probably doesn't know how it feels to fight for the privilege to breathe, to be able to look away from a dirty ceiling with rusted lights, people in black suits, white coats.

Hibari doesn't know, and that's why he probably doesn't see how much _easier_ it'd be to bring about mass extinction than to pick off a few bad apples at a time. That's why he doesn't see a problem to how there may be no end to the pack _of hyenas, of flies_ , that are beginning to swarm him. He doesn't see how even a fallen body can fight back for as long as it's still alive, too distracted by the wonders of his dance and battle to hear the _pop_.

The _pop, pop, pop_ of a silenced gun, _the proof of their fear, even when this is what they'd been seeking all along, telling Tsuna to be what he is not_ , marking of the end of this one-sided scuffle.

Hibari doesn't make noise through the pain that Tsuna almost feels in his stead, _even when no man-made weapon will reach him, wouldn't even be allowed to come close_ , too ungraceful as they were. He snarls through his silence instead, snarling even as his tonfa falls from the hand of his wounded shoulder. He seems singularly focused on readying his remaining tonfa, heedless of his handicap. Heedless of how the world is starting to turn bright, bright.

Ah, but. That's just Tsuna's world. Only Tsuna's world is changing, _bright_ , with the reminder of how Hibari is only human. How he's only human, only human _still_ with a small body and arms that look thin and fragile against the bulk of an adult's body. He's only human and a child. Just like Tsuna, and so very much _unlike_ Tsuna by the nature of being human, by the Will that graces Tsuna with the fate of how he _will be king_.

 _A carnivore is not what you fear_ , Hibari had said. Pain and death isn't what you fear, because what Tsuna fears, he holds it closer to himself than anyone else. Pain is nothing in comparison to the fire that can burn, _burn_ , until there isn't anything left behind to heal, except--

Except he needs, wants, Hibari to remain standing more than Tsuna doesn't want to burn, to burn the living, breathing world.

He needs Hibari to stand so that Tsuna doesn't have to _be the only one still standing above a piece of charred concrete_ , needs that more than these men in their suits need to remain whole, than for Tsuna to be _the only one that gets to be okay_ , because he won't be. If Hibari is okay, he won't be.

Tsuna welcomes the colours that settles over him with that resolution in mind, calming and damning. He looks at the world with all of its colours, how it appears to him with all their edges. Behind him, there's a yell, and he doesn't need to be _here_ to hear the silence that descends as, surely, the hand that had been digging bruises into his shoulder grows engorged with a burn that will never recover.

_That is no mouse._

When Tsuna looks down, the outline of his own hands appear to glow, swathed in an aura of orange and red, and, ah. He's burning. ( _Burning like a little firefly under the duvet._ )

Hibari is looking at him with clenched jaws. His eyes close briefly, perhaps to shield them from the colours that are bleeding out from Tsuna's very edges, perhaps in something else entirely. And the pack of men, the whole of their swarm, they all flinch backward, instinctively wary of anything that burns, clutching at their guns and their crowbars.

_They should know their place._

He's burning. It's only fair that they should, too.

*

Tsuna stands amongst _the rubble, the pride of_ the men strewn around him. He watches them breathe, laboured and uneven as a factor of their pain. They're not dead, because the fire does not leave corpses to be found. No, they will all open their eyes _a hundred years_ later, soon after he's done collecting his bag from the ground, _crumbling under the force of his will, ravaged by the promise once made to him: thy will be done._ It's a wonder what they will remember when they do, a wonder if they'll remember how _smoke and ash can asphyxiate the air to purge a century of rot. The turn of an era is always messy as_ he'd bent their expectations, leaving them to puzzle out the seconds before their pack had fallen like _the birth of something new. His own inauguration had been one of_ flies. It's curious what they'll tell themselves to explain the _metal bars, cardboard soups, blood_ , discrepancies. Or maybe they won't have to, because _footsteps shatter the brittle bone and rock of his creation, and_ Hibari Kyouya is there, still there, to meet Tsuna's gaze when he rises from his task. And Hibari Kyouya is still a force of nature; he can still be the reason for their fall.

 _He smiles._ Tsuna smiles, and the next breath out feels like a cleansing, the bleeding out of something awful and old as his double vision coalesces back into one. As he comes back to the here and now.

Tsuna tilts his head up towards the sky to watch and feel the rain sizzle mid-air, brushing against the tips of his hair as patches of steam. His chest aches with the weight of the fire and how it seems to say: _we've been waiting_. It seems to say that it's been longing, _yearning_ , for him since his birth twice over. For without him, the fire is nothing more than madness incarnate, no different from the other destructive urges of nature. It desires nothing more than serve, to do as Tsuna wills and wishes, to burn anything and everything that might stand before him: the sullied histories, the polluted ideals, the very world itself.

And that very fire is what's curling around him now, shielding him from the way that Hibari suddenly appears from Tsuna's left to slam down a foot and _swing_ (the only tonfa that he has left, with the arm that isn't bleeding), knocking Tsuna into a daze as the weapon screeches against the blaze, ringing deafness in his ears.

Tsuna grabs onto the fire as it tries to push back, snap back, shrieking its fury against Hibari's momentum, because burning Hibari isn't-- that's not something Tsuna can allow. Hibari is not allowed to burn as Nagi had, because Tsuna's better than that now, he's gotten _better_. That's exactly the type of mistake that Tsuna can't make twice.

So he hangs on, just hangs on, until Hibari can step in close to grab Tsuna by the jaw, tight and steadfast, knocking him back against a wall, an actual one. It's a grounding grasp, that grip, one that bullies Tsuna back into awareness. A grip that feels familiar, one that Tsuna recognizes and accepts, even as Hibari uses his grip to shake Tsuna's brain back into place.

"Enough, Sawada Tsunayoshi," Hibari says. _Wake up._

Huh. Strange, Tsuna can actually hear him. He can hear him, the roar in his ears dimming to a low simmer. No longer muted out, muffled, Hibari is close enough that he can be heard, _should_ be heard, and--

And, maybe, Tsuna is now ready to hear him.

"Enough," Hibari says, low and demanding even without a tonfa in hand, which.

Coming to Tsuna unarmed? How very much unlike, how unexpectedly nice. Silly in his trust, yet so deep in his understanding of how the fire might respond to such open displays of hostility. He looks at Tsuna carefully, gauging, but with no surprise. No surprise, no shock. No rejection of a person who might be new to the sight of fire.

Tsuna raises a hand to press against the fingers on his jaw. Not pushing them away, but as a pressure, _heat_ , that makes Hibari narrow his eyes, but eventually allow. Tsuna waits until he allows it, then looks to the bodies. All unconscious, not dead. Still flesh and bone, not ashes to be lost to the wind and rain.

A mistake, perhaps. Perhaps one that he has to fix while he still has the time and the will to fix it.

"They should burn," Tsuna says, looking back at Hibari. It's not a question, not even an offer. Just a matter of fact, like how the moon will rise with the downfall of day.

"They have disrupted Namimori's order," Hibari says in agreement, "They deserve to be bitten to death."

"But?" Tsuna prompts. His voice sounds distant and flat, calm in midst of pandemonium and very much unlike his usual pitch of exhaustion. It should be terrifying. It's not, and is all the more terrible for it. Terrible, and real.

(Very, very real.)

"But Namimori should not have to burn to punish a few dogs," Hibari says.

Tsuna tilts his head and takes Hibari in. Takes in the tension that lines Hibari's shoulders, the adrenaline that shakes his form. He looks for bloodlust in a face that reflects only duty, sees no manic search for battle and conquest but only the proud form of Namimori's future protector, the only one that may dare to snarl back at wildfire. What stands before him is something to be respected, something that may soon vow and pledge to soothe away the colours and the fire with only the force of his mortal will.

"Namimori is mine," Hibari reminds Tsuna. It would be imploring if Hibari Kyouya would degrade himself to do such a thing. As it is, he just sounds annoyed, irritated at having to state what must seem so obvious to no one else but himself. "That makes them mine to discipline."

His to discipline, his to herd. His to spare or to kill.

"Stand down, little king," Hibari says. The scavengers will learn their place.

Tsuna closes his eyes in acquiescence, and lets go.

*

_I had this dream, about a field trip._

*

He lets the colours go.

Then slowly, carefully folds into the panic that piles as bile in his throat, his mouth. Pain is what comes to Tsuna first, comes to him to say, _hello, surprise!_ , this is not a dream. This is all real. The ground is a blur of concrete and dirt when Tsuna falls into it, when Hibari lets him, buckling under the weight of memories- _not-memories_ and a cacophony built on nightmares and lies, on dreams that're trying to bleed into reality.

Concrete. Gravel. The sound and smell of rain in the place of grass and bunnies and serenity, the feel of rain as it finally touches down against Tsuna's skin as it _should_ , because this isn't-- it's not--

Not a memory. Not a dream. Not just a retelling of something already passed.

This is real. _This is real._

 _Little king,_ Hibari had said. That much is true.

 _You will be king,_ the nightmares tell him still. This _can't_ be true. It isn't supposed to be.

The body closest to him opens his eyes at the silence that descends, and looks to Tsuna as if to say, _monster._ Tsuna flinches, and feels the dull sting of slicing his palm open against something sharp like shattered pieces of glass. The body opens his mouth to _actually_ gurgle, " _Mon--_ ", but Tsuna isn't given a chance to flinch again, because there's still a tonfa.

There's still a tonfa to fall across the head of that body. Head to a wall. A wall that blooms with a grunt, becomes decorated with another _CRACK._

Nausea is what saves Tsuna in the end, sweeping him clean of all the things shaking Tsuna clean of his grasp on the world. He retches them up in dry heaves that leaves his face wet and awful, leaving him with no perception of time. He can see the redness on the wall from a field trip ago. He can see the bloodied face that Hibari had recreated. He can hear Hibari talking lowly in the background, saying words like _Tetsuya_ and _car_ and more things that Tsuna can't possibly be expected to comprehend.

He retches and shakes until he can't, distracted into kicking back when a hand circles itself around his neck.

( _Around his neck, squeezing, urging, demanding regality when there is only Tsuna, when there has only ever_ been _Tsuna._ )

Around his neck, around only the _back_ of his neck. Hibari doesn't do so much as flinch as he pulls Tsuna in, absorbing the panicked blows with no more than a mild grunt.

"Enough," Hibari says. Says _again_. It's a firm, constant pressure that he keeps to Tsuna's neck, steadying as he is unrelenting. "Namimori's lunch bread should be digested properly. Stop throwing it up."

Tsuna smothers the mania of his laughter into the (clean, unwounded) shoulder that his face is pressed against, a shoulder that smells of battle and smoke. The hand around his neck grows heavy with Hibari's irritation, as he bears down without ever once tightening his grip. Tsuna's laughter quiets in increments, as he's anchored by the surety of Hibari's heartbeat and how it drowns out the _what if's_ from his thoughts. It makes it easier to close his eyes and look once again at the-- at _its_ need to ravage and consume, its singular adoration of him.

He looks until he's without the need to run, to sleep, and Hibari holds him through it. Grounding, as Nagi had once been.

"Are you okay?" Tsuna asks when he can catch a hold of his words again, when he can finally ask, had this been worth it? _Are you okay?_ Could Hibari still stand, or would Tsuna be alone again?

"Be quiet," Hibari tells him, which isn't a _yes_ , but nor is it a _no_. It's _definitely_ not a _no_ , because he's _talking_ , isn't he? Hibari even sounds like himself: constantly and persistently irritated. He's probably more okay than not.

"You were bleeding," Tsuna says, choking his way through the syllables of a truth that he'd meant to deny, deny, _forget_. Forget, like he'd done for weeks, _months_. Forget, as he'd always done.

"You're bleeding more," Hibari says.

Tsuna finds just enough control over his head to be able to look down at the dull throb of his hand, the small pool of diluted blood in rainwater that it sits in. It doesn't even look real, really. Looks more like a painting, or a passing daydream.

He flexes his fingers. One to five, all accounted for. And-- wait. Wait a minute.

"That's not-- _Hibari-san_ , it's not supposed to be a _contest_ ," Tsuna whines. He tries to pull away, and gives up in short order when Hibari doesn't budge. Doesn't even twitch. And without the-- and without being in the state that had allowed him the strength to throw aside people four times his size, Tsuna doesn't stand a chance in moving Hibari Kyouya when Hibari Kyouya doesn't want to be moved.

It's such a strange thing, to find relief in weakness.

"You were bleeding," Tsuna says again, hurt, and-- something else. Something that tastes like acid on his tongue.

Hibari takes a moment. Tsuna appreciates it, the lack of flippancy to something that Tsuna had thought, _still thinks_ , to be an important point to this all, because Hibari had been hurt. Someone who should have been invincible had been _shot_ , and bled. (Human, only human.)

"And you came here," Hibari says, chiding, "We've both made mistakes. Stop pushing. I'm fine."

Hibari is still bleeding; Tsuna can see ripples that Hibari's blood leaves in the small puddle of Tsuna's own blood, _drip drop_ in a pattern that's heavier, more pronounced, than the steady beat of rain. But he doesn't want to ask for a promise, _cross your heart that you're okay_ , can't bring himself to. A promise would be an expectation, and Hibari had not yet shown any inclinations towards being bound. (Close, but not yet.) It's not fair of Tsuna to ask.

But that's-- that's okay, maybe.

For now, that's okay, because when Hibari finally lets them stand, Tsuna can have a better look around at the sight of the large, unconscious bodies of men that he doesn't know. People that he doesn't actually want to lay his eyes upon, but should nevertheless look at. It helps, marginally, that he's looking down at them, and that they can't look back.

( _He's not rejecting them, but he also stops making the mistake of trying to accept them._ They're not his. He won't let them be his, despite how they beg him, _you will be king._ )

Tsuna curls his cut hand into a fist and holds it against his chest as he takes his first step forward, stepping over a leg. He turns when there is no answering echo of a footstep, turns to make sure that Hibari is still there, still standing. And he _is_ ; he's holding his shoulder closed with knuckles that look white and tender, and he looks a little grey around the cheeks, but he's surveying the carnage that he, himself, had promised to bring, but Tsuna had instead delivered.

It's a thought that should have made Tsuna shiver, shudder, and scorn, because _I'm looking for a way out without hurting them,_ he'd once told Nagi.

_Even if they hurt you?_

Even then, because they weren't supposed to have hurt him if he didn't hurt them. But he'd ended up hurt them anyway, because there's still blood on the wall. There's people on the ground, and not one of them is moving. They'll all catch a cold when their bodies have recovered enough to wake up. That one man's hand looks like a lump of coal that bad children are rumoured to get for Christmas, stinking terribly like when his mom had once overcooked their steaks.

 _I'm looking for a way out without hurting them,_ he'd told Nagi, because he hadn't wanted to be the only one that was okay. That had been the only reason. He doesn't-- he doesn't actually _care_ that that man doesn't have a hand anymore. He doesn't care that these people might all have to go to the hospital, because they're all too old for Namimori Elementary. Their school won't be reprimanding Hibari even if Tsuna doesn't drag them into a shade.

Tsuna shivers at the thought, at the freedom to think, _I don't have to care_ , because he's not the only one standing right now. Not anymore, even with all of these people on the ground, all of those people that he might have, could have, turned to ashes and smoke. He's not, because Hibari's still standing.

"I figured it out," Tsuna mumbles to himself, an echo of a memory that he'd since yearned to become a reality.

And that? That's better than any worded promise.

Shaky, wet, and miserably missing his mom, Tsuna smiles.

*

"Sawada-kun?"

Tsuna startles hard enough to trip, his knees buckling with enough force to send him tumbling to the ground. He wipes quickly at his face with the sleeve of a shirt to glance up at the brown eyes of Sasagawa Kyoko, the girl of class 2-B who just has to smile to fill Tsuna's cheeks with warmth. She does that for him now, anchoring him to the present and the dilemma of being wet, miserable, missing his mom, but _forbidden to go home_ , why, Hibari-san?

_You owe me a debt._

He grunts (or, well, more like _whimpers_ , but grunting sounds a little-- better, kind of) with the effort to lift his face off the ground, to look at Sasagawa Kyoko in the eye. She looks politely concerned, but Tsuna can see the tiny twitch of a smile to her lips that tries to brighten up her face. He almost wishes that she'd ridicule him so that he could see it, and shakes off that thought _right now_. Enough, as Hibari would say, because that's-- that's a little embarrassing.

\--A _lot_ embarrassing.

"Sasagawa-san," Tsuna chokes out, struggling back onto his feet, "Uh-- sorry. Hello."

"Are you going to be okay?" Kyoko asks gently.

Tsuna takes a moment to appreciate the specificity of her question, its use of the future tense than the rhetorics of asking, _are you okay?_ Are you okay, drenched like that? Are you okay, smelling of rain and blood and cigarette butts?

"Yeah, I mean," Tsuna says. Stalls, really. "It will be? It'll be okay."

Kyoko doesn't question Tsuna's own use of the future tense, just tilts her head.

"Do you want me to get you a towel? And to share my umbrella later?" she offers after a moment, "Club stuff's all done, so I was about to go home. And my umbrella's big enough for my brother and me, and you're, um… younger than he is, so it should fit us both."

Younger, smaller, more pathetic. Like an abandoned puppy in the rain, which. Not unfounded, considering.

But he's not yet allowed to go home, while she _is_. And she couldn't go home if they were to share her umbrella, if she tried to be kind by waiting for him, to see him home after Hibari's business had finished. So he says, "Thank you, Sasagawa-san, but I--" He still doesn't say _I'm okay_ , but he _does_ tell her about how his mom will come pick him up with a car that they do not have. It's an easier lie to say.

The look that she gives him reminds him of the look that Nagi used to wear when Tsuna said _I'm okay_ , when he said _I'm okay_ after his dreams. It's both soft and chiding at once, and the parallel makes it all that more easier for Tsuna to encourage her away.

"At least call me Kyoko," she says in parting.

"Kyoko, um, Kyoko-chan, then," Tsuna says. He wishes there was more that he could offer than a smile in return for her easy kindness. "Then-- Tsuna. For me. If… uh, you want to."

"Tsuna-kun," Kyoko says without hesitation. She waves as she leaves, bright and brilliant. "I hope you feel better tomorrow. See you!"

Tsuna raises a hand in farewell, and watches her disappear behind the corner streets, waiting until she is well and truly gone. He scurries and tucks himself underneath the shadows of a staircase to wait longer still, waiting for the last few students to trickle past, to close his eyes until the building itself seems to sigh a breath of relief after a long day's work.

He feels stiff and sniffly by the time that he staggers his way into the _hallway, third floor, last door to the right_. Wait in there, Hibari had said.

Tsuna hooks his fingers into the handle of the sliding door. Takes a deep breath, and lets himself in.

*

Hibari has a room. His own room, in the middle of a hallway with functioning classrooms, a little office with a couch. And blankets. And pillows. And a _coffee maker_. And-- and an alarm clock, plus a mini-fridge that Tsuna opens to find cartons upon cartons of strawberry milk, plus one melon.

Tsuna closes the fridge door slowly.

He feels like he should've known, somehow, that Hibari had a room in Namimori Elementary. That he had a room that looked more like a home. One that looks cleaner than Tsuna's own.

It's hard to tell how long Tsuna spends on the ground, just that it'd been long enough for his legs to start cramping and protesting the squat that he'd been crouched into. At the very least, he knows that he's on his butt with his back to the couch when a towel falls on his head and over his eyes, fortunately sitting too low to the ground to do anything but stiffen and scrabble at it instead of, you know, falling on his face. _Again._

"What are you doing," Hibari says in yet another odd echo of things forgotten, things remembered.

"Uh," Tsuna says.

Tsuna smiles shakily and grabs onto each side of the towel on his head instead of elaborating, instead of pretending to know how to speak. He pulls it taut, ignoring the pinch of an ache as the cut on his palm rubs against the wool. His hair doesn't feel much drier despite his efforts, though it _does_ make the water _drip, drip drip_ from the tips of the strands. All over Hibari's pristine white floor.

Hibari looks at it. Tsuna looks at it, and counts each drop as a bruise that he'll probably have to carry home on his skin.

"I'm sor--"

"No," Hibari snaps, interrupts, rejects.

When Hibari comes to squat next to where Tsuna is trying to curl into himself, he looks-- dry. Actually, he _is_ dry, miraculously so. His shoulder even looks halfway patched up, though the bandages that keep it temporarily intact looks hilariously off-center, especially in comparison to everything else about Hibari that looks put together. On display, almost.

Dry and preened, Tsuna thinks, rubbing the towel over his head idly. Hibari had preened himself. For who?

"Give me your hand," Hibari says.

Tsuna blinks. But-- but he needs his hand. He needs his hand to dry off. So he says, again, "Um?"

Hibari growls, " _Hand_ , Sawada Tsunayoshi."

Tsuna hands over his hand. He doesn't giggle at the silliness of the sentence, but it's with effort. Lots and lots of effort. Everything feels extra funny right now, even the way that Hibari stares at him as if he's worried for the state of Tsuna's questionable intelligence. Because, ah, he'd handed over the wrong hand, hadn't he? He draws back his right hand before Hibari could bite it off, replacing it with his left. Hands over the one with the cut for Hibari to grab by the wrist and swipe the wound clean with-- with-- _whatever_ that makes it feel like his hand is on-- like his hand is burning.

Or, well. Not burning. This isn't burning, this is a sting. Like having to wait for Nagi, missing her as much as he misses his mom. Like the times that his thoughts turn back to remember the way that she'd smiled at him, pledged to him. The relative easiness to those days. The confidence of her presence.

"Funny day, huh?" Tsuna asks as Hibari meticulously inspects his hand.

"Don't," Hibari warns him, squeezing his wrist so tightly that Tsuna has to yelp. "Save your hysterics for when you're alone."

"I didn't even _say anything_ ," Tsuna complains, except. "Sorry, I lied. I'm still talking, aren't I, I--"

" _Be quiet_ , Sawada Tsunayoshi," Hibari hisses.

Tsuna means to be quiet. He really does. But he has his questions, questions that won't stop buzzing, buzzing, _buzzing_ until he speaks them out loud. He starts with, "But who were those people, Hibari-san?"

Hibari scowls at him, but eventually answers, "Dogs. Nothing but a few stray mutts, trying their hand at hunting a true carnivore. Foolish."

"Oh. Uh, are they going to be okay?"

"They'll live," Hibari says, which isn't so bad, so _of course_ he has to follow up with, "Most of them."

Most of them, most of whoever that Hibari had left untouched. Anyone that did not require cleaning up, on account of Tsuna's sloppiness. Hibari says none of that, but then, it's obvious enough that he doesn't have to.

Tsuna nods and hums the low beat of a commercial that he'd seen yesterday. Or maybe that'd been weeks ago. Who could say, with a memory like his?

Hibari sighs, ever suffering, and asks, "Why did you look?"

Tsuna stops humming. He blinks slowly.

Ministrations momentarily paused, Hibari is looking back, unyielding as he appears interested. Curious enough that he chooses to later elaborate, "Your mind runs when your scent changes."

 _Your mind runs._ Only Hibari Kyouya could be so entirely nonsensical and terrifyingly accurate at the same time. Tsuna somehow understands him anyway.

"I thought--" Tsuna starts. He bites his lip. "The last thing that I remember is telling you about the field trip. I thought-- I thought I was just remembering." He draws up his legs against his chest to rest his forehead against his knees. He mumbles, "I feel like I just woke up from after the rabbits."

Had Hibari napped then too? It's hard to remember.

"It's Thursday," Hibari tells him.

Monday, Tuesday (which is rarely ever there), Wednesday. Almost three days. Two days and a half, lost and gone.

"Oh," Tsuna says again. He feels itchy. Maybe he should start humming again?

"This isn't the first one that you remember," Hibari prompts again.

"Well, I--" Tsuna says. Oh. Oh no, this wasn't going to end well. And indeed, Hibari's eyes are narrow and dangerous when Tsuna dares to take a peek at his expression. "Uh, there was an eraser, this one time?"

Hibari is blank-faced for all of a second before-- " _Sawada Tsunayoshi._ "

"Ow, ow, ow! It was an accident!" Tsuna says in a near shriek, jerking back when Hibari tips his grip into something brutalizing and excruciating, only to be jerked right back into place by the hand that was still in Hibari's possession. "It was an accident, I didn't know it was happening until-- until _after!_ I mean, erasers can catch on fire, right? Like on accident? Sometimes?"

Tsuna snickers at the words as soon as they hit the air, snickers with something mean and derisive. So dumb you are, Tsuna. So stupid. Embarrassing, no-good.

_You're wrong._

Tsuna shakes his head. Whispers to Nagi, _sorry_ , then adds, "But after that, I tried to-- to stop it."

The sleeping, the dreaming. The days spent alone.

"I tried," Tsuna says, and he sounds small, suddenly, even to his own ears. Small, and lost. "I thought it was getting better." It was supposed to have been a dream. A dream, because _your dreams aren't real, Tsu-kun._ "Because-- because if it isn't, what if, the next time--"

"Next time," Hibari says, taping the bandages into place with little care and absent warmth. "Will be after our nap."

Tsuna winces, and then says, belated, "What? I mean, sorry? Wait, _our?_ "

"Next time is not _now_ ," Hibari says, surly and annoyed by the need for repetition. Scowling, too, over the need to explain himself. It must be exhausting to be Hibari Kyouya sometimes. "Getting stuck on the _what if_ 's are pointless. It's annoying."

"I'm not-- that's not-- it's not _pointless_ ," Tsuna flounders, because this 'what if', it _wasn't_. It wasn't pointless, it had _a lot_ of point to it. Next time could be any time. Next time could be in a few days, a hours, or even a few minutes from now. Next time, Hibari might come away with more than just a shoulder on the mend, he might be-- "Hibari-san--"

"No."

"But--"

" _No_ ," Hibari snarls, "If you must, then you will save your next time for until after _my_ nap. Are your ears for show, Sawada Tsunayoshi?"

"Are _yours?!_ Why do you always--" Tsuna snaps back, and-- oh. Oh, no.

Hibari bares his teeth. Given his current proximity to Tsuna's person, that face appears extra terrifying today. "Yes?"

"Uh, it's-- it's nothing," Tsuna says, flattening himself against the back of the couch.

"No," Hibari says again, "Finish your sentence so that I can bite you to death."

"After your nap," Tsuna says.

Hibari looks at him blankly.

"After your nap. Our nap," Tsuna says again, more slower, with more diligence, "Right? Hibari-san? That's-- that's what you said?"

"… That is," Hibari allows after a moment, with no small amount of peevishness.

Tsuna's not going to smile. He's not going to laugh either. _Really_ , he's not laughing. There's nothing funny about incurring the wrath of Hibari Kyouya over _nap time_ , over the time of day that Tsuna should find himself at risk for setting the world aflame, to lose more days than he can actually remember. That was just-- silly. He clears his throat.

"Yeah, so I'll try to-- I mean, the next time, it'll be after your, our, naps. Definitely. I, uh, I promise," Tsuna tries.

Hibari glowers at him, but he releases Tsuna carefully nonetheless. Carefully, but without fanfare. As though Tsuna's fractures are too pedestrian for notice, things to be accepted rather than things to be fixed. It's a halfway tender gesture that he then belies by wiping his own hands free of Tsuna's germs, cooties, _whatever_ , with stone-faced disgust.

For the record, Tsuna's still not laughing.

"You're a menace," Hibari says. He rises to his feet, graceful in a way that Tsuna could never hope to be. Graceful, despite the slight limp to his usual polish of motion. He gestures to the towel on Tsuna's head. That's _still_ on Tsuna's head. "Hurry up."

Tsuna looks up at Hibari rather than to immediately obey, because that's not the tone of Hibari telling someone to leave, to _go away_. That's the tone of voice that Hibari uses to say, _follow, but don't crowd_. That's the tone of voice that tells Tsuna that this, whatever this is, is not yet over, though-- why? Why isn't it? They talked, sort of. Hibari had even patched him up, as bizarre as the thought now sounds.

"Hibari-san?" Tsuna asks as he starts rubbing his hair dry again.

"Visitors," Hibari says in explanation without explaining _at all_. Not surprising, just typically Hibari.

And, in accordance to Hibari's fondness for dramatic timing, that is, of course, when the door to Hibari's office-room-home slides open, leaving Tsuna to recoil at the sudden smell of sakura blossoms that overtakes the room.

The woman that steps forward is a dainty person, even smaller than Tsuna's mom in height. Small shoulders, a fine nose, and narrow eyes. With black, black hair that falls and curls around her shoulders, brushing up against the shoulders of her kimono. When she sweeps her eyes across the room, it's not without leaving Tsuna with a sense of deja vu, of _where have I seen this before?_ It's on the tip of Tsuna's tongue, at the edge of his thoughts, as the woman's gaze skips from Hibari to Tsuna, to Hibari and back to Tsuna.

"Good evening, Kyouya-san, Sawada Tsunayoshi," she says, and Tsuna gets it. He gets it, he knows _exactly_ who this woman could be, _has_ to be.

The fox-like features of her face twists themselves into a smile before Tsuna can work up enough air in his lungs to answer. She's already dipping at the knees in a strange half-bow, half-curtsy that almost knocks Tsuna off of his feet just as he'd managed to climb back onto them, startling him backwards.

Startled, and scared. _Scared?_

 _No, don't,_ Tsuna almost says, begs. He manages none of that, not a single letter, because by the time that he opens his mouth, she's already speaking.

"It's an honour, Your Highness," Hibari Kyouya's mom says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for reading!


End file.
